Film
graham.rickson
May 2021 should have seen the appearance on Netflix of a new restoration of Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoleon, lasting nearly seven hours and timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death. The release was delayed, but, in anticipation, theartsdesk spoke to the composer and conductor Carl Davis, who has died aged 86. Davis’s soundtrack for the groundbreaking 1980 screening of the film, assembled by historian Kevin Brownlow, brought him international acclaim, though his career scoring silent films had started several years earlier.GRAHAM RICKSON: I became aware of your name Read more ...
James Saynor
People have been making films about the unreliability of memory since, oh, I can’t remember. Often it’s a cue for a genre escapade, but here French filmmaker Alice Winocour gives us a social drama, telling the fictional story of a survivor of the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130.To recover, the lead character has to sort out an understanding of events from the Escher staircases of her upside-down recollections. It’s an absorbing movie that becomes slightly less so in the final third.Mia (Virginie Efira, pictured below) is a good-natured translator who one evening Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Liz Taylor’s blowsy late-period persona is finessed to its finest point in this 1974 Muriel Spark adaptation, boldly plugging into the mains of her fragile talent.Lise (Taylor) travels from Hamburg to Rome after a mental breakdown, sporting black Medusa hair and a coat of many colours. Arriving onset a day after divorce from Richard Burton, who had dragged his own latest production to Italy to attempt a boozy rapprochement, Taylor makes Lise imperious and damaged, moving in somnolent reverie then stirring to hostilely engage with the world. Moments alone are spent in masturbatory fugues, or Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It doesn’t do to be in a hurry in Nepal. In Baato, directors Kate Stryker and Lucas Millard follow Mikma and her family as they travel 300 kilometres from their mountain village in Eastern Nepal to the town of Terai. It takes the best part of a week for the five adults, two boys, and two dogs to walk the narrow paths until they reach the unpaved road where they can board rickety buses or jeeps to complete their journey.The trip is an annual event. Every winter for hundreds of years, villagers have been making the journey south to sell medicinal herbs gathered over the summer months in the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Another week, another toy story, in the wake of Barbie. And another origin-of-hit-product story, too, after Air. The Beanie Bubble, though, has none of the surprisingly gripping appeal of Nike’s rise and rise via a single trainer design, nor the (sporadic) wit and bounce of Greta Gerwig’s mega-hit. It’s all corporate idiocy, shabby dealings, and misogyny. And failure is nowhere near as fascinating as success.The saga of the small semi-stuffed toys known as Beanie Babies was the tulip fever of the late 1990s. A fading manufacturer, Ty Warner, seized upon the idea of downsizing his product line Read more ...
Justine Elias
Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover.In Talk to Me, the new horror movie directed by twins Danny and Michael Philippou, Australian teenagers dare each other to become possessed by the dead while their friends capture the terrifying (or embarrassing) effects on their mobile phones.Talk to Me is no simple summer roundup of cheap shocks and jump scares. Full of shadows and melancholy, the movie delivers a sharp, twisty tale of shifting allegiances among a rough Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Céline Devaux, known for her award-winning short films, wrote, directed and drew the animations for her charming, funny debut feature, which takes the concept of the critical inner voice and runs with it.Blanche Gardin is brilliant as Jeanne, whose revolutionary invention, a structure that traps and removes microplastics from the ocean - it's called Nausicaa, which doesn't bode well - ends up as a dismal failure at its launch.Once woman of the year – come on, woman of the century, she tells herself in a grandiose moment – she’s humiliated on social media, bankrupt, all investors gone. Her Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are scores of films set in and around circuses. Aravindan Govindan’s bewitching Thamp̄ (The Circus Tent) isn’t like any of them, though I was fleetingly reminded of Jacques Tati’s largely plotless Jour de fête – which also opens and closes with a big top being assembled then dismantled in a small rural community.Thamp̄ isn’t a comedy. Categorising the film is difficult. It looks like a documentary shot on the hoof, and Govindan is credited as screenwriter, but in a later interview he claimed that “we didn’t have a script and we shot the incidents as they happened.” So, Thamp̄ begins Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used to elicit emotional responses in his movies' audiences, as Cousins cuts rapidly from one memorable excerpt to another. Quite a feat since Hitchcock died 43 years ago.The conceit mostly works well thanks to the unseen Alistair McGowan’s impersonation of Hitchcock. Insinuating and sardonic (not least in his fleeting observations about the speeded-up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With a track record that includes Memento, Dunkirk, Insomnia and Inception, Christopher Nolan is not a filmmaker who could be accused of a lack of ambition, but even by his standards Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement. Its three-hour running time is a little daunting, but it’s as if Nolan is saying if you want to make the most of this trip, you have to make the commitment. Its historical scope, intellectual depth and sheer cinematic power make Oppenheimer a thing of wonder.Nolan has based his story of the renowned physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The prologue to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie augurs well. A gaggle of young girls in a rocky desert are playing with doll-babies while enacting the mind-numbing drudgery of the early 20th century housewife. Then a new godhead arrives, a giant pretty blonde whose stilettoed feet turn slightly inwards. The girls go into a frenzy of old-doll-smashing, Also Sprach Zarathustra swells up and one girl throws her doll high in the air.But that’s more or less it for the oldster cinephiles in the audience. Still to come is a “Proust Barbie”, plus chatter about cognitive dissonance and existentialism, as you Read more ...
graham.rickson
Early editions of Swiss novelist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1958 novel The Pledge carried the subtitle “Requiem for the Detective Novel”, the writer’s point being that murder cases can take years to solve (if at all) and that those doing the investigating make mistakes. The story has been filmed several times before, Sean Penn’s starrily-cast version (released in 2001 with a weather-beaten Jack Nicholson in one of his last decent roles) the best known.Hungarian director György Fehér’s Szürkület (Twilight) is radically different in tone, a requiem for the crime thriller which unfolds at a daringly Read more ...