Film
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Celine Dion first experienced the muscle spasming which would eventually be diagnosed as Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS). She suddenly found she couldn’t control the pitch of her voice, a calamitous occurrence for a singer renowned for the almost superhuman power and accuracy of her vocal control. The condition advanced surreptitiously over the succeeding years, and when Dion had to pull out of her residency in Las Vegas in 2021 it became clear that the problem was acute.The Cleveland Clinic website informs us that SPS is “a rare autoimmune neurological disorder that Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Yorgos Lanthimos continues to navigate a highly distinctive, daring, one might even say sly path for himself. After attracting more mainstream audiences with his crowd-pleasing period romp The Favourite, and the gothic feminist fable Poor Things, he now returns to the bleak, discomforting and strange worldview of his earlier films. And for the more recent fans, the uninitiated to the director’s roots, Kinds of Kindness may be something of a shock. Regardless, it’s very refreshing to see a filmmaker mix it up in this way, finding ways of realising his sensibility Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Belgian artist, Francis Alÿs has filled the Barbican Art Gallery with films of children playing games the world over. Many of them are familiar; they’re playing five stones in Nepal (pictured below left), conkers in London, stone skimming in Morocco, scissors/paper/stone and musical chairs in Mexico, hopscotch and leapfrog in Iraq, flying kites in Afghanistan and having snowball fights in Switzerland.On one level, then, the show is about the ubiquity of children’s games and it provides perfect entertainment for the kids. But it is also much, much more. Some of the films are pure delight. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rose has taken a while to get a release in the UK; this Danish comedy-drama opened in Scandinavia back in the autumn of 2022 and won positive reviews in the US last Christmas. Releasing a movie just as the sun finally appears to make spending an evening in a cinema unappealing, seems like a risky choice. But if you harbour a soft spot for Sofie Gråbøl (main picture), the actress who sparked a worldwide run on Faroe Island sweaters when she starred in The Killing, Rose may well draw you back into the dark. Gråbøl here is playing a very different character; Inger Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Forty years later, they have haggard faces, grey hair if any, and sorrowful expressions tinged with incredulity at the outrages perpetrated against them. At one point, the burliest of them cries. One who struggled with drink and drugs says four of his colleagues committed suicide.To different degrees these British men, interviewees in the latest documentary by Hillsborough director Daniel Gordon, are suffering from PTSD. Most were born into the generation that fought in the Falklands War – one, in fact, served in Northern Ireland. It’s not as ex-servicemen that they tell their stories to the Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2 thriller unfolds at a daringly slow pace, the dialogue pared back to essentials. Melville based his screenplay on a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel, a fictionalised account of the author’s experiences as a member of the French Resistance. The big set pieces are viscerally exciting, but the mood is subdued, cinematographer Pierre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Helpfully, this is a film that reviews itself. Like it says on the posters, “They were making a cursed movie. They were warned not to. They should have listened.”If ever a film was meant not to be, here it is. Apparently it was going to be called The Georgetown Project, and writer-director Joshua John Miller shot the bulk of it in South Carolina in 2019. Then it was shelved, not least because of Covid. It was belatedly resurrected and some extra scenes added, but the botched-together result is dead on arrival.Not the least perplexing thing about it is how Russell Crowe, who was once a copper- Read more ...
James Saynor
We’re used to dabs of colour splashing briefly across black-and-white movies – Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Coppola’s Rumble Fish spring to mind – but director Agnieszka Holland has a new and uncompromising variant on the ruse.The colour opening shot of Green Border swoops across the treetops of an emerald forest in Middle Europe, but in less than a minute the verdant image bleaches into monochrome. It never seems likely that a multi-hued continent will be back on our screen for the rest of the movie – 152 minutes of brilliant, controlled filmmaker fury – and so it proves. This Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The best-known book about motorcycle gangs is Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, a classic foundational text of the so-called “New Journalism”. It was published in 1966, two years before Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders, the source material for Jeff Nichols’ new movie. Lyon (now 82) was primarily a photographer, but in this case accompanied his pictures with interviews with his subjects.Lyon didn’t just get close to the members of Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club, he became one of them. He recalled how Hunter Thompson “advised me not to join the Outlaws and to wear a helmet. I joined the club and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
How can it be part of God’s plan to allow so much pain and suffering in the world, asks Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) of a young Oxford don, CS Lewis (Matthew Goode). His daughter Sophie died of the Spanish flu, his grandson, aged only five, of TB, he tells Lewis furiously. To those who believe in religion, his advice is: “Grow up.”“If pain is His megaphone, pleasure is His whisper,” says Lewis enigmatically. “Man’s suffering is the fault of man.” Freud takes another swig of whisky laced with morphine for the pain from his cancer of the jaw. In Nazism, he says, he recognised the face of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), The Small Back Room turned to haunted psychological and social realism, veined with tension, humour and bleak beauty.Based on Nigel Balchin’s wartime bestseller, it is set during spring 1943’s mini-Blitz, as a new sort of booby-trapped bomb needs defusing. Sammy Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benjamin Brewer’s post-apocalyptic, Nic Cage-starring creature feature finds a sombre interest in fatherhood and growing up in screenwriter Michael Nilon’s bleak scenario, after Paul (Cage) gathers up two abandoned babies with black smoke blooming, and a city falling into catastrophe.Fifteen years later, adopted siblings Joseph (It’s lead kid Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) live in a farmhouse under Paul’s sternly loving tutelage, foraging by day, and cowering when night brings monsters scratching at their door, much like A Quiet Place or a vampire flick. Arcadian was filmed Read more ...