Film
Tom Birchenough
Crossing is a remarkable step forward for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. There are elements that build on his acclaimed 2019 Tbilisi drama And Then We Danced, but his new film is rich with a new complexity, as well as a redolent melancholy, a loose road-movie that speaks with considerable profundity of the overlapping worlds in which it is set.The journey in question is from Batumi, the main seaport city of southwest Georgia, to Istanbul, where the greater part of the story unfolds, although narrative in itself is of less importance, Akin’s emphasis instead being on observational Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of American playwright Annie Baker’s work know what they are likely to get in her film debut as a writer-director: slow-paced interactions between characters thrown together in a confined space – a workplace, a B&B, a clinic – where long bouts of silence are not uncommon and little happens but everything important somehow gets said. Janet Planet is classic Baker in this respect. In some scenes, the birds and crickets make more noise than the humans, and whirring fans get solos. There’s also music, a rarity in a Baker stage production, here mostly coming from car radios or home Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As Janis Pugh’s semi-autobiographical Chuck Chuck Baby draws to a close, the camera fondly plays around the smiling faces of some of its voiceless female characters – careworn middle-aged workers in a Welsh chicken processing factory. They're cheered by finally seeing something good happen to one of their number. It’s the romantic musical drama’s most loving visual aside – the poultry packers’ ingrained pain and disappointment momentarily forgotten.The woman in question is Helen (Louise Brealey), at the start a near-broken drudge, pushing 40 and consigned to domestic misery, her only Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,14 million Britons, are now living in poverty. This shocking statistic is one the enterprising people of the Cardboard Citizens company, with The Big Issue as producer-hosts, are shining an unforgiving light on. They have created an impressive collection of nine simply shot but effective monologues about homelessness, poverty and inequity that will appear weekly on bigissue.com. The sting in the tail here is that this is work created by writers, directors and actors Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Apparently when actress Maika Monroe first saw Nicolas Cage in his full Longlegs get-up, her heart-rate skyrocketed to 170 bpm (her resting heart rate is 76). Or at least so a promotional video tells us. Whether true or not, it’s an example of the savvy marketing campaign, courtesy of distributor NEON, that has drummed up a genuine sense of anticipation for Oz Perkins's latest film. A handful of glowing early reviews and whispers from early screenings confirmed that Longlegs was the summer’s must-see horror film. I can confirm that a movie inspiring such overblown rhetoric does, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question Korean director Jason Yu is asking in this eerie little spine-tingler (his debut feature) is “how well do you know your partner?” He may also be inquiring whether or not you believe in life after death, while planting nagging seeds of doubt about the competence of the medical profession.A ride both disturbing and sometimes darkly comic, intensified by an edgy and neurotic soundtrack, Sleep has chosen for its claustrophobic battleground the apartment of married couple Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, from the Oscar-blitzing Parasite, who shockingly killed himself last year) and his wife Soo Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s over 50 years since men last landed on our orbiting space-neighbour, but director Greg Berlanti's Fly Me to the Moon transports us back to the feverish days in 1969 when Apollo 11 was about to tackle the feat for the first time. The film’s promo material rather misleadingly bills it as “a sparkling rom-com”, but it has a few other strings to its bow. For instance, it’s partly a satire on American capitalism and the advertising business, takes a few sideways glances at the Vietnam war, and has inherited some of the DNA of a political thriller.It’s an eccentric mixture, but it works thanks Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.X riffed on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1976) as elderly killers stalk a 1979 Texan barnyard porn shoot, and found a haunting frisson in Mia Goth’s duel portrayal of murderous, ancient Pearl and youthful Maxine. Pearl then recast The Wizard of Oz’s Kansas prologue in a grim 1918 equivalent to Dorothy’s rustic home, Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a lot to unpick in Zoltán Fabri’s 1956 film Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta). Take leading man Imre Soós’s disarming resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, and a central love story which plays out like a Hungarian take on Romeo and Juliet with some post-war agrarian politics thrown in for good measure.Fábri keeps his narrative and thematic plates spinning brilliantly: Soós’s charismatic co-operative farmer Máté falls for Mari (a luminous Mari Törőcsik in her debut film appearance), whose father István is a stubborn private smallholder looking to expand his empire. Fábri captures a society on Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On one level, Heart of an Oak is the most spectacular nature film you are ever likely to see. The camera glides over a forest before honing in on a magnificent, 210 year old oak tree. It travels up the gnarled surface of the ancient trunk, which resembles elephant hide, into the canopy. Time to introduce the cast of what directors Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Sedoux describe as an “adventure movie”: weevils, a red squirrel, woodpecker, robin and pair of jays, field mice and some wild boar. All of them live in or around the tree and this is their story.It’s high summer, but a storm is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Nature of Love joins a recent spate of films where older women enjoy what a mealy-mouthed columnist would describe as an inappropriate relationship. Whether it’s Olivia Colman bedding a much younger black colleague in Empire of Light, Emma Thompson hiring a sex worker in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, or Anne Hathaway shagging a boy-band singer in The Idea of You, the scenario allows for smooching and soul searching in equal measures. This time the risk-taker is a French-Canadian philosophy lecturer in a pleasant but passionless marriage. Sophia (Magalie Lépine- Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic Back to Black, written by Matt Greenhalgh and starring Marisa Abela (Industry) as Amy Winehouse, has been criticised for its soft-focused approach.And its sympathetic portrayals of Blake Fielder-Civil (a punchy Jack O’Connell) and Amy’s dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) are very different from those in Asif Kapadia’s damning 2015 documentary Amy. The possibility of the famously protective Mitch having any editorial control is denied by Taylor-Johnson, but one wonders.In interviews in the sparse, disappointingly bland and overly reverential “special features” on this DVD/Blu Read more ...