Film
Graham Fuller
It’s an odalisque to arouse envy in Titian, Boucher, Ingres, or Manet.Filtered amber, white, and blue lights successively bathe Brigitte Bardot, crowned by that golden cloud, as she asks Michel Piccoli, her co-star and screen husband in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963, Contempt), to evaluate her naked body’s flawless components while she inventories them post-coitally – feet, ankles, knees, thighs, behind, breasts, nipples, shoulders, arms, face, mouth, eyes, nose, ears.In assessing her economic power as a sexual commodity, however, Bardot (playing ex-typist Camille Javal but also herself) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The French auto-fiction writer Annie Ernaux, now 82, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last year; now a fascinating new facet of her creative life has been released via her home movies.With her now grown son David Ernaux-Briot (who was three in the first of the films), Ernaux has fashioned a short (63-minute) documentary from the Super 8 footage her then-husband Philippe shot between 1972-81 – short, but rich, Ernaux’s narration lifting the everyday images into the realm of a cultural commentary with profound reach. It’s also a double portrait as these are the years that the Ernaux Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Multi-media meta-layers land fast in Wes Anderson’s 11th film, overriding reality. Here’s Bryan Cranston’s portentous Fifties TV host (pictured below) in black-and-white, boxed Academy ratio, documenting rehearsals for a televised play, whose fictive reality then becomes a widescreen colour train hurtling through the desert. The latter scene's exhilarating cinema still sweeps you up.We spend most of our time in that train’s desert stop, Asteroid City, where Steve Carell’s oily motel manager is on hand to greet the Junior Stargazers convention, including Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year Jennifer Lawrence won critical plaudits for her war-trauma drama Causeway, which seemingly signalled a bold new direction for her career, but how she got from there to No Hard Feelings is a bit of a mystery. Nothing about it feels quite right. Sometimes it seems to want to be a gross-out comedy, occasionally it seems to think it’s distantly related to The Graduate and wants to give us a dose of ironic social commentary, and every now and again it gets a bit weepy and emotional, but never in a way that makes you want to join in.Lawrence, now a venerable 32, plays Maddie Barker, a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pinned eyes stare from a frozen husk of a face as a clubber comes down, cradled high over London on a window-cleaner’s perch. Director WIZ’s 18-minute video for Flowered Up’s rave epic “Weekender” (1992) takes you on the E’d up odyssey of Little Joe (Lee Whitlock), from skinning up at work through clubland peaks to chilly aftermath.This BFI release pairs this perfect marriage of music, film and moment’s 2K remaster with Chloé Raunet’s new documentary I Am Weekender. Here Jeremy Deller dubs Weekender “the first meditation on rave culture”, Lynne Ramsay, who similarly caught clubbing’s hazy Read more ...
Justine Elias
Superhero movies are the nearest equivalent to American holiday parades: they come along with noisy, bright regularity, and crowds either flock to them, many eager persons deep along the sidewalk, or flee to quieter neighbourhoods.The Flash, yet another foray in the DC Comics Universe (the one that contains Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman) is extraordinary only for the pre-release bad press surrounding its star, Ezra Miller, who after brushes with the law in the US and Iceland, announced that they are seeking psychiatric care.As a movie, The Flash turns out to be a mix of adequate, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Pretty Red Dress opens with a classic Motown-esque girl group belting out a show tune before cutting to Travis (Natey Jones) as he leaves prison. Waiting for him outside is Candice (Alexandra Burke); she’s sitting in her Audi, singing along to the radio.At home is their teenage daughter, Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), happy enough to have her dad back in their Lambeth flat on a council estate, but facing her own problems at school with both authority and friends.Candice works as a cashier at a local supermarket but dreams of being a performer; she spots a sequin-studded, bright red mini- Read more ...
Justine Elias
Medusa is having a moment. From Natalie Haynes’ feminist novel to the recent Brazilian horror movie, the beleaguered, beheaded, snake-haired monstress of Greek myth rises again, and again, as a symbol of female rage and resistance.Now comes Medusa Deluxe, a stylish, comedic murder mystery set at a hairdressing competition. Keep a close eye on those scissors: the struggle to control hair (real and fake), “the crown you never take off”, has already turned deadly as the film begins.Though one of the top contenders, the never-seen Mosca, has turned up dead – scalped! – at his stylist’s chair, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This frothy bio-fantasy about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and top tunesmith to Marie Antoinette at the French court, could have been a powerful and revealing shout-out to a woefully under-appreciated composer.Directed by Stephen Williams with a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, it’s more like Bridgerton Goes to the French Revolution, an absurd bouillabaisse of melodrama and characters who may be elegantly dressed but are uniformly paper-thin.Bologne was born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and an Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Set on the lands of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota, War Pony focuses, in a hazy way, on the lives of 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), who has two toddler sons with two different mothers, and 12-year-old Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) who seems to have no mother at all. Both are struggling to get by. Drugs, violence and chaos rule on the Pine Ridge reservation. The women are mainly exasperated with the men. A poodle called Beast also plays an important role.It’s an extraordinary film: bleak, gritty, tragic, sometimes funny, and a seemingly unlikely directorial debut from actress Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mario Bava and Dario Argento are cited as key influences on Robert Sigl’s debut feature Laurin (1989). British viewers will also be reminded of the series of MR James ghost story adaptations broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s; a glimpse of a murdered child peering through a window eerily similar to a terrifying sequence in Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s macabre Lost Hearts. Éva Martin’s ornate, candle-lit sets are also redolent of vintage period drama.Sigl was in his mid-twenties when he wrote and directed Laurin, and it’s a surprise to learn that such a bold, confident debut didn’t lead to greater Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...