Film
Adam Sweeting
As producer Jerry Bruckheimer cautioned a preview audience, “Remember, this is not a documentary. It’s a movie.” Bruckheimer teamed up with director Joseph Kosinski to make Brad Pitt’s Formula One movie, the same duo who masterminded Top Gun: Maverick. Both films share a kind of dazzling hyper-reality which dares you to try to deny it. You might think “that’s ridiculous, that could never happen,” to which the filmmakers might reply “yes it could, because we just did it.”The F1 paddock and pitlane must have been getting pretty crowded during the making of F1 over the last couple of seasons, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Composer Bernard Hughes first met director Richard Bracewell when working on the film Bill, a 2015 Horrible Histories take on the life of Shakespeare for which he provided some of the score. The pair were keen to collaborate again but the pandemic put paid to their plans. The new black comedy Chicken Town sees the pair reunited.GRAHAM RICKSON: This is a film made on a small budget. How do the economics of a production affect how you work?BERNARD HUGHES: I discussed the brief with Richard from the very start, and there were two big considerations. Namely “what do you want it to sound like?” Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 23 years since 28 Days Later and especially those since Danny Boyle’s soulful encapsulation of Britain’s best spirit at the 2012 Olympics have offered rich material for a franchise about deserted cities, rampaging viruses, hard quarantines and an insular, afraid country hacked adrift from Europe.28 Years Later takes this chance with punk chutzpah, right from a pumped-up prologue in which children watch Teletubbies to mask the sound of the adult world being eaten by Rage virus-infected zombies, only to be devoured too in a frenzy of close-up Anthony Dod Mantle camerawork, vintage digital Read more ...
James Saynor
Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the head of his teenage cousin after the cousin is executed by jihadists. But see the film you really should.In an opening 10 minutes of pre-title exuberance, goat-herders Achraf (Ali Helali) and Nizar (Yassine Samouni) are seen fooling about, looking for water, helping a lost baby goat and sunbathing in mountains above the plains where they live, bouncing among canyons sculpted in umpteen shades of tan and salmon, and speckled with extremists.Like wolves descending Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A look at Darling on its 60th anniversary offers a sobering reality check on the "Swinging Sixties", a reminder of the fallacy of the decade’s gaiety and supposed liberation, especially for women. This attractive 4K restoration reveals the film to be a very complicated animal indeed – both in its own time and through the prism of today’s very different political correctness and gender ethics. While John Schlesinger’s "classic" plays like a scathing satire of the period, I’m not convinced that this was entirely intentional at the time, which of course makes it even more Read more ...
Justine Elias
The opening images of Tornado are striking. A wild-haired young woman in Japanese peasant garb runs for her life through a barren forest and across burnt-orange fields. As her pursuers, a rough-looking band of thieves, draw nearer, she seeks refuge in a seemingly deserted mansion. Where are we? When are we?Tornado’s title card informs us that we’re in the British Isles – actually, Scotland – c. 1790, but fans of director John Maclean’s first film, Slow West, will be familiar with this cinematic landscape of brutal virtues, a place where myth, mist, and murder combine to overwhelm the senses. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On leaving prison, Lollipop’s thirtyish single mum Molly discovers that reclaiming her kids from social care is akin to doing lengths in a shark-infested swimming pool teeming with naval mines. Thanks to Posy Sterling’s technically astounding performance – a whirligig of fluctuating, gut-level emotions – audience sympathy with Molly never flags. Despite her Cockney toughness, she’s a woman under the influence (of traumas galore), on the verge of a nervous breakdown, at the end of her tether.But as a frantic, flailing woman constantly going off the deep end, she harms her cause. More Read more ...
James Saynor
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year – from gushing BBC documentaries to actually quite witty Hallmark cable movies – France offers up Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a cordial, low-energy rom com that sets out to Austenify the lovelorn of Paris.In Laura Piani’s debut feature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works at the Shakespeare and Company English bookshop on the Left Bank and is a ultra- Read more ...
Justine Elias
If you’re horse mad or merely an every-four-years Olympic fan, you already know Nick Skelton’s story. Equestrianism can favour mature competitors, but Skelton was twice the age of his rivals. He'd survived numerous injuries – including a broken neck – by the time he propelled Britain to showjumping gold in 2012. Fifty-four at the London games, he wasn’t done. Both he and his horse Big Star returned to the Olympics four years later to win the individual gold medal.In a handsomely mounted but unrevealing documentary, Big Star: The Nick Skelton Story, admirers from inside and out of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Wick’s simple story of a man and his dog became a bonkers, baroque franchise in record time, converting Keanu Reeves’ limited acting into Zen killer cool. Now Ana de Armas extends her delightful No Time to Die cameo as a high-kicking, cocktail-dressed MI6 agent into her own heroic assassin.From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, to give its full cumbersome franchise title, takes place between John Wick 3 and 4, prior to the latter’s perhaps final denouement. We meet Eve as a child hiding out with a dad whose particular set of skills are sorely tested by a mass assault by minions of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Do you know the name of the propaganda minister of England, or America, or even Stalin? No. But Joseph Goebbels? Everyone knows him.” The cynical, grinning Dr Goebbels (Robert Stadlober), perhaps the first master of fake news, is not short on confidence.Joachim Lang’s controversial film Goebbels and the Führer (Führer und Verfürer, or Leader and Seducer, in German) spans seven years, from the Anschluss in March 1938 to the last days in a bombed-out Berlin in May 1945, when, after the death of Hitler, Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children, probably with cyanide, and then killed Read more ...
John Carvill
What constitutes a “lost classic”? I guess we can’t say it’s an oxymoron, since we readily accept the concept of “instant classic”? Either way, the “classic” aspect may be in the eye of the beholder, but “lost" is more easily quantified. Simon Perry’s slippery 1977 psychological thriller Eclipse certainly fits the bill, having languished unseen in the BFI vaults for nigh on half a century.Tom Conti plays Tom, twin brother to the deceased Geoffrey (also played by Conti), or “Big G” as he was known to everyone, including his son. Tom was present when Geoffrey died in mysterious circumstances, Read more ...