Film
Graham Fuller
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.While depicting Mafia violence as a pestilential evil, The Kingdom allows that crime families’ blood ties and Old Testament revenge ethos prevent insiders from walking away and starting their lives elsewhere. Such Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.This mystery at first seems secondary to its effect on six protagonists, whose points of view provide pieces of the puzzle. Alongside artfully creepy imagery and gorehound excess, Cregger relies on structure and characters to reel you in, till the central enigma is Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. Taking the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Haugerud's drama is no singular achievement but one-third of a loose trilogy that non-judgmentally explores the complexities of human relationships, sexual identity, and romantic and not-so-romantic love and passion. Each film presents characters troubled in some way by their inner selves Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels Read more ...
graham.rickson
The years between 1955’s The Ladykillers and 1964’s Dr Strangelove were the years of what Sanjeev Bhaskar recently described as "peak Sellers", a period when the great comic actor rarely seemed to put a foot wrong. Two Way Stretch and Heavens Above! succeed largely because both films feature Peter Sellers alongside talented supporting casts, his performances by necessity subtler and more nuanced. Two Way Stretch (★★★★★) stands up brilliantly, Robert Day’s compact prison-set comedy, released in 1960, prefiguring La Frenais and Clement’s 70s sitcom Porridge. We first see Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves on and off, measuring medications into syringes, finding veins for IVs and saying, endlessly, “Ich komme gleich” (I’ll be there soon) or “Have you pain on a scale of one to ten?”Swiss writer-director Petra Volpe’s film is compulsively watchable and brilliantly paced and edited, with an exceptional soundtrack by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated version Liam Neeson has stepped up to the plate.Neeson has become synonymous with his celebrated “very particular set of skills”, though farce and light comedy have not usually been among them (we perhaps tend to associate him more with savage revenge dramas). Nonetheless, he successfully raises a few chuckles here.He plays Frank Drebin Junior, son of Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But if two things are certain, it's that his performance as an emotionally withdrawn conductor in Matthias Glasner's Dying confirms him as one of the finest German actors of his generation, and that he has a sublime talent for character-building.In the film, which is divided into five chapters, Glasner explores his personal relationship with his mother. Yet the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Marvel goes back to its origins, gulping the fresh air of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first hit comic The Fantastic Four in 1961. Ignoring recent flop film versions, it revels in a self-contained, space-age world as yet uncluttered with other costumed characters, and heroes who aren’t brooding vigilantes but human beacons of light.We’re on an alternate Earth (isn’t every story?), in a retro-futurist dream of New York in ‘64, four years after scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal, pictured below) flew a pioneering space mission with his pilot friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), wife Sue Storm Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the title of Matthias Glasner’s award-winning drama, and the death that swirls around its characters, dying isn’t really its subject, but the mess of living. Dysfunctional family, eccentric love affairs, addiction, depression, creative obsession that teeters towards suicide, and the worst advertisement for dentistry you will ever see – it’s all here, in a German canvass of misery and survival so casually engaging and provocative that its three hours pass far more smoothly than any number of action-packed, plot stuffed franchise pictures. Writer/director Glasner won the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted.Her second feature Attenberg (2010), about a 23-year-old virgin who doesn't want sex or like people, was an accentric marvel. Shortly afterward, Tsangari co-produced her friend Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps. Whereas Lanthimos has since made himself comfortable in Hollywood, Tsangari has taken a different route. She recently travelled to the Inner Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously successful, his eponymous radio series featuring him sparring with a talented supporting cast. The brilliant scripts were supplied by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Despite the show's popular and critical success, Hancock's own insecurities were already taking root and led him to make the final season of the show's TV incarnation without regular partner Sid Read more ...