Film
Saskia Baron
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman’s 1974 evocation of 1930s Mississippi, wasn’t a commercial hit on its original release, even though Pauline Kael called it a masterpiece.This Depression-era tale of a trio of hapless bank-robbers was shot on location with no star names. Keith Carradine plays Bowie, the youngest of the thieves who have just escaped from a chain gang. In jail since he was 16, he has a naiveté that Carradine captures beautifully.Holed up in a small town, the loose-limbed Bowie falls for a local girl, Keechie, played by Shelley Duvall in her first major role. Struck by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable, his debut also resists the grim “adult” gravitas routinely borrowed from Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s Eighties comics, popping with bright colours and breezy, communal humanity.Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, pictured below) is our teenage hero, forced to give up post-college ambitions when his family home is threatened with repossession in Palmera Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of facing up to the truth about yourself. However, instead of Stop With Your Lies, we get Lie With Me.The faux pas, if that’s what it is, is hardly the movie’s fault, although a movie star, Molly Ringwald, is to blame. She isn’t in the film, which has an all-male cast except for two walk-on roles, but it was Read more ...
James Saynor
Experts in irony tend to see life as faintly absurd, relatively meaningless and usually circular. They’re too self-aware to be neurotic and live life in short bursts, letting out little private snorts of dry, amused exasperation at frequent intervals.German filmmaker Christian Petzold seems like an irony boffin and offers up characters sunk in inconsequence, with the repetitive life injuries that a plughole-orbiting existence can give you. He knows that tedium is an odd joy of cinema and his movies can be slow wind-ups. But he can afford to be laid-back with his storytelling because he’s such Read more ...
Justine Elias
Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-adolescent girls who undergo rigorous training to prepare them for (or protect them from) the perils of womanhood, Lucile Hadžihalilović forged a daring path into the unknown. With her first English-language feature, she journeys even further. Told this time from the perspective of an adult, Earwig – based on the experimental novel by B Catling Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White People) at least professes himself a fan of the titular attraction, and with screenwriter Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation, Paul Feig’s female Ghostbusters) slips humanity into the corporate shilling.Simien personalises and improves on the original 2003 Eddie Murphy vehicle via casting and character detail. Protagonist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emanuele Crialese’s latest, L’immensità, is an oddity. It’s perfectly formed, yet still feels as if its final reel went missing. Its title – usually translated as “infinity” – is typical of this enigmatic quality. “L’immensità” turns out to be a hit Italian pop song from the late 1960s, which finally plays over the end credits; its lyrics are about being just a speck in an infinite universe, though one that perhaps will turn into a butterfly, redeemed by the love of somebody special. If you aren’t au fait with the song, Crialese makes you wait a long time to have the title unpacked. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Popped straight out to the streamers, Nicole Holofcener’s new film has apparently been labelled as insufficiently marketable for a theatrical release against the juggernaut of Barbenheimer. Surely by now a movie that doesn't feature either Ryan Gosling or Florence Pugh’s bare chests could be allowed in the cinema?Some of us might be craving dialogue we can hear and a 90-minute running time, or a script that doesn’t yammer on about the patriarchy while smothering us in pink. It's hard to believe that You Hurt My Feelings wouldn't have sold a few tickets in the cinemas that cater for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Describe The English Surgeon as the story of a plucky doctor attempting to defeat a brain tumour and you’d incur the wrath of its protagonist Henry Marsh, who, in a recent interview included here as an extra, moans that he hates seeing surgeons portrayed as heroes, as, in his words, “patients are more heroic.”Marsh, a pleasingly self-deprecating neurosurgeon, can’t help saying something profound every time he opens his mouth, and you can see why documentary-maker Geoffrey Smith was drawn to him. An awful lot has changed since the film was made in 2007 and shown in BBC Four’s Read more ...
James Saynor
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in quantum physics – dead and alive simultaneously – they’re both five stars and one star. Or at least that’s how many cineastes saw slasher movies in the romping, anything-goes era of postmodernism 40 years ago, when Quentin Tarantino was gleefully slinging work by Dario Argento or Abel Ferrara across a video-store counter somewhere.From that perspective, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Seth Rogen-produced, Family Guy writers-co-scripted gross-out comedy with four Chinese-American women fully lives up and down to its description. With Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim as debuting director, it’s also another demographically pioneering work.Audrey (Ashley Park), a Chinese girl adopted by white American parents, bonds with Lolo (Sherry Cola) as the only Asian-American kids in their Seattle neighbourhood, growing into odd couple adult best friends, Audrey’s promising corporate law career contrasting with Lolo’s struggling sex-positive art. Audrey’s business trip to seal Read more ...
Justine Elias
Big bitey sharks and prehistoric monsters have tantalised the imaginations of summer moviegoers for decades, from Jules Verne to Jaws. James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water and the director’s recent scientific commentary on the OceanGate submersible disaster also serve to underline the public fascination with the dangerous deep.Alas, Meg 2: The Trench, based, like its predecessor, on Steve Alten’s hit novels about hungry megasharks, bellyflops and bores. Too bad, because leading man Jason Statham can be a most droll and reliable hero even when the movie around him becomes defiantly Read more ...