Film
graham.rickson
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and amazed at the veteran director’s ability to knit together so many seemingly disparate threads.Penélope Cruz plays affluent photographer Janis; becoming pregnant after a liaison with Israel Elijalde’s married forensic anthropologist Arturo (whom Janis asks to help investigate a Civil War grave in her home village), she later shares a hospital room with Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the more heartwarming images in the news recently has been seeing Ukrainian refugees being welcomed by their eastern European neighbours. But there’s been very few mentions of how centuries-old European hostility to the Roma people, gypsies, and Travellers, has prevailed. These Ukrainians with an equally urgent need for refuge from violent Russian invaders have been met all too often with closed doors and closed borders. It’s timely then that Roz Mortimer’s 2019 documentary The Deathless Woman is touring the UK in a series of special screenings that are aimed at raising Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. If sorrow and futility enshroud it, Davies leavens the bitterness with his tartest dialogue yet; the second act, much of it depicting Sassoon’s romantic disappointments in the no man’s land of the 1920s and 1930s, is a sustained comedy of exquisite bad manners – of which he is always the loverlorn, masochistic victim.The very English middle son of a wealthy Jewish merchant and his Anglo-Catholic wife, Captain Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Only 36 years later, Tom Cruise is back with his eagerly-awaited Top Gun sequel (it was delayed a couple of years by Covid), and there are loyal legions of fans out there desperate to see it. The original, some say, in some way helped to “define” the 1980s, grossing $360m and spinning off a monster multi-platinum soundtrack album, headlined by Berlin’s cheesy synthetic megaballad “Take My Breath Away”. Early reviews have been ecstatic, even delirious, but altitude can play strange tricks.From a ground-level perspective, Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a game of two halves. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s Leeds squat, Southview House, in the early Eighties, shows one of them jovially composing a song called “Norman Fowler is a Shit-stain in Margaret Thatcher’s Underpants” on an acoustic guitar (Norman Fowler was Thatcher’s Secretary of State at the time). It’s funny and silly, but also made me long for the era when art-fury was a common cultural Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
The Innocents made a splash at Cannes in 2021 and it’s easy to see why. The Norwegian supernatural thriller, deftly written and directed by Eskil Vogt (who co-wrote The Worst Person In the World), explores the murky time in childhood when moral boundaries are still being drawn. This deeply creeply but heartfelt film keeps you in its grip, only loosening its hold slightly in the underwhelming final act.It opens with Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her family on their way to their new home, a large council estate surrounded by forest. Ida’s sister Anna (Alva Ramstad) is autistic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first film rendering of Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in early 1930s Berlin, I Am a Camera has been restored and released on Blu-ray to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Popular when released in the UK in 1955, presumably because it was then risqué, director Henry Cornelius’s movie has curiosity value as a monument to bad writing and acting and for the feebleness of its condemnation of Nazism.Julie Harris won the first of her five Tony awards playing Sally Bowles in Henry Van Druten’s Broadway play, which he'd adapted from Isherwood’s novella Goodbye to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose joint decline is a protracted saga of alienation, confusion, and fear.When worrying is your default mode and oblivion your near future, dignity is an out-of-reach luxury and survival a harrowing moment-to-moment ordeal. As blunt as ever about human flaws and vulnerabilities, the Argentina-born French filmmaker Nóe typically offers no bromides or balm Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the serial killer as protagonist, minus Hopkins' later suave intellect as Lecter, or Dexter’s benign foibles.Debutant director John McNaughton begins with a close-up of a beautiful woman’s face, then pulls back to contemplate her body in blood-splashed grass, one of several aestheticized tableaus showing a slaughter pandemic. The sound design’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that are guaranteed to make an audience feel their age. Unless you’re steeped in the multiverse genre (The Matrix films, the Marvel canon, etc.) and are comfortable with absurdist pop culture memes, it may well leave you reeling. Brace yourself for two hours and 20 minutes of handbrake-turn jokes and surreal, comic action sequences. Divided into three parts, Everything focuses on Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), an immigrant from Hong Kong who runs a laundromat in the San Fernando Valley. She lives above the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Quiet Girl is adapted faithfully from Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story, Foster, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and then expanded into a novella.Much of the dialogue in Colm Bairéad’s beautiful, mainly Irish-language film, which is in many ways about the power of silence, is reproduced unchanged from Keegan's book.Set in 1981, the first scenes present nine-year-old Cáit (the marvellous Catherine Clinch, a 12-year-old newcomer) as more obviously unfortunate than in the book, perhaps to build up back-story.She’s bullied and slow at school and wets the bed at home, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nick Cave’s cinematic progress has been unexpectedly, catastrophically personal. 20,000 Days On Earth (2014) introduced Bad Seed Warren Ellis as his droll, wild-bearded foil, with scripted, semi-fictitious revelations. Andrew Dominik’s One More Time with Feeling (2016) was a compassionate crescendo of grief at the death of Cave’s son Arthur, alongside sessions for the album Skeleton Tree, finding the singer suddenly raw and defenceless, searching for balance and a way forward.Dominik returns here to film lockdown performances of songs from Ghosteen, the record which truly reckoned with Arthur Read more ...