Film
Sarah Kent
“They say there are only two stories,” explains director Treasa O’Brien. “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” O’Brien was born in Dublin to a naval family that had to up sticks and move every two or three years. Her first school was in Malta, where the other kids would neither speak to her nor play with her since she was an outsider.In Town of Strangers she invites people who likewise live far from home to recount their stories. Gort, a small town in the west of Ireland, is the perfect setting for her enquiries since, per capita, it has the most diverse population in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saint Omer is a psychological and sociological mystery, unpicking the enigma of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a French Senegalese woman who drowned her 15-month-old daughter in the ocean.Director Alice Diop recognised her own Senegalese heritage and circumstance in the case of Fabienne Kabou, the murderer of a mixed-race child much like her own, who was racially pathologised in the French media. A prize-winning documentarian, Diop’s first feature adapts Kabou’s trial transcripts, and was filmed next-door to her courtroom in the depressed northern town of Saint-Omer.We glimpse the Paris life of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Shrek universe expands a little more with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, another computer-animated family film from DreamWorks, with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinnault reprising their roles as Puss and his frenemy Kitty Softclaws. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado serve up a treat, one worthy of its Oscar nod for best animated feature.As with all the Shrek Cinematic Universe output, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish subverts fairytales and nursery rhymes while telling its story, and part of the fun is seeing which the writers Paul Fisher, Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler plunder Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Yes, Brendan Fraser gives a fine, Oscar-nominated performance as a morbidly obese man in director Darren Aronfsky’s mawkish, voyeuristic The Whale. Best known for Gods and Monsters, George of the Jungle and the Mummy trilogy, and more recent TV roles in The Affair and Trust, it’s Fraser’s first lead in a film for 12 years. But one of The Whale’s many problems is the way the fat suit, or, to give it its correct term, weight-gain prosthetic, takes up so much mental as well as physical space. That’s hardly surprising – it’s been nominated for an Oscar too. When Fraser first saw it he Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been a good year for donkeys at the cinema. Not only did Martin McDonagh make a surprise star out of Jenny the miniature donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin, but she’ll be competing at the Oscars with the title character of EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s paean to beautiful Sardinian donkeys. The veteran Polish director has crafted a film like no other, weaving together extraordinary images with a devastating score by Pawel Mykietyn. We first meet Eo performing with a travelling circus. He’s led through his tricks in the ring by his devoted trainer Kasandra ( Read more ...
Saskia Baron
You Resemble Me is the very definition of a passion project, and all the better for it. First-time director Dina Amer was a journalist working for Vice News. She was sent to Paris to cover the 2015 terrorist attacks that left 130 people dead and hundreds more injured. Amer was on the scene when the police raided a flat where the terrorists were based. A young woman who died in the explosion was widely proclaimed to be France’s first female suicide bomber. The news was filled with lurid tales about Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a daughter of Moroccan immigrants who had swapped Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has?Doomy it may be, but Paunov’s allegorical folk chiller is also a joy – a playful grim fairytale that disturbs the imagination more than the viscera thanks to its evocation of haunted woods, barely seen, that symbolise Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching these harrowing films in rapid succession allows us to watch a great director’s confidence develop at close hand; though 1955’s A Generation (Pokolenie) is an impressive debut for a 27-year old director, both Kanał (1957) and 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) really show Wajda’s technique taking flight.The three films are thematically linked but don’t share any characters, tracing life in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 until the end of the European conflict in 1945. The opening sequence of A Generation shows a bombed-out Warsaw slum. Tadeusz Łomnicki’s teenage anti-hero Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg sometimes directed The Fabelmans through a film of tears, as he recreated his cinema’s origins. Lightly fictionalising his own family history, it turns an autobiographical key to previous films, while being fundamentally different to anything he’s made before.His destiny’s zero hour is October 1, 1952, as nervous six-year-old Sammy Fabelman prepares for his first cinema trip, to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth. Dad Burt (Paul Dano) tries to demystify moving pictures’ illusion. Mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) drops to Sammy’s level so he dwarfs her on screen, and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone.But Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers so much more. It moves between two interlocking strands: the twin stories of Nan the activist and Nan the artist, and, fascinatingly, shows how one informed the other. Goldin grew up in New Jersey but at 14, silenced by her older sister’s death, was sent away to reforming schools and was only saved when she ended up at a hippie establishment that didn’t believe in expelling Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Seventy-eight years ago, on January 27,1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. The iconic images of the ovens with charred skulls and emaciated survivors peering through barbed wire were filmed by Russian cameramen over the following weeks and not on the day itself. And from the very beginning, there was a degree of staging in what the world was shown.The troupe of children who marched between the electrified fences were dressed for the camera in the striped uniforms of adult prisoners, which they had never worn under the Nazis. The emotional power of those images – Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...