Film
Nick Hasted
Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner. Their first encounter is disastrously un-cute, as he leeringly suggests she’s heading north to sell herself, pawing her lap for emphasis. But this idiosyncratically romantic film testifies that most people have something in common, if forced together long enough to find out.Laura thought she’d be sharing her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome. He has always needed name actors who’ll go all the way, six-time collaborator Willem Dafoe’s devotion keeping his recent career going. Ethan Hawke is the star this time, playing twins – soldier JJ and revolutionary Justin – on apparently opposite sides of a plot to blow up the Vatican.Ferrara envisioned Zeros And Ones’ Rome as a “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
“Everything bad that has happened to me has happened because I’m black,” laments teacher Joseph Pascale (David Oyelowo) in Shoot the Messenger, directed by Ngozi Onwurah in 2006 from a script by the late Sharon Foster. Handsomely produced and visually stylish, it was originally broadcast by the BBC.They presumably kyboshed Foster’s original title, Fuck Black People! Not that there’s any suggestion of Foster’s message being toned down: Shoot the Messenger’s anger and energy are infectious, and leavened with judicious splashes of sly wit.We first meet Joe as an over-confident young teacher Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music’s psychological cost might have resulted. Ina Weisse’s film is more incremental and naturalistic, as violin teacher Anna (Nina Hoss) gives special attention to teenage protégé Alexander (Ilja Monti), to the jealous resentment of son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev), while nervously returning to the stage herself.Weisse starts with tableaus of music work at Anna’s Berlin conservatoire. When camera and characters get close-up, the trouble – and, sometimes, loving connection – starts. Because music is in Anna’s family’s bones, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.Symptoms of Morbius’s newfound condition are as follows: super-human speed, super-human strength, echolocation and, as he ultimately discovers, flight. Morbius, for all intents and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ealing Studios’ output encompassed much more than comedy, though a viewing of 1952’s The Gentle Gunman suggests that political drama wasn't one of their strengths.Based on a play by Alexander McKendrick’s cousin Roger MacDougall, and directed by Ealing stalwart Basil Dearden, The Gentle Gunman’s problems start with its casting. Dirk Bogarde and John Mills rarely convince as brothers serving in the IRA during the early years of World War II, both actors struggling to maintain convincing Irish accents for more than a few seconds.There’s a fascinating film to be made about Ireland’s shady Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What the [expletive deleted]?That’s a viewer’s only logical response to the 94th Academy Awards, which was trudging along predictably and fairly aimlessly until such time as Chris Rock took to the stage in the closing hour and events took a dramatic turn. Forget the envelope mix-up of 2017, the streaker of 1974, or Sacheen Littlefeather subbing for Marlon Brando in 1973. None of those unscripted moments can match the shock that ensued when Will Smith responded to a GI Jane joke Rock had made in reference to Smith’s wife’s shorn hair by stepping up to the stage and striking the presenter in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner and Brazilian Oscar entry is advertised as “a tropical melodrama”, and its Rio seems barely to have left the jungle. We first meet sisters Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler, pictured below) becoming separated in lush foliage’s deep greens and humid shadows, and they will go on to live tragically parallel lives, crushed by patriarchal crimes while retaining rebel sparks.Eurídice is 18, Guida 20 as the Fifties begin. The sisters have hungry eyes and mouths, and quick, incredulous laughs at society’s absurd demands, as enforced by baker dad Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Speed in an ambulance? Gone In 60 Seconds meets Heat? Reports that Michael Bay’s lockdown-shot LA film would be an intimate, “character-based” drama don’t survive contact with the director’s high-concept, high-velocity MO. If anything, working within pandemic restrictions in the Covid-emptied streets has amped up his OD’ing on tech and technique.Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is more earthed as Afghanistan veteran Will Sharp, living in a cramped, Stars and Stripes-draped flat with his cancer-stricken wife and their baby. He’s thus convinced to ask a life-saving financial favour from his bank-robber Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Some British TV viewers who were in junior school in the mid-1960s will recall the imported Australian kids’ show The Magic Boomerang. When the adolescent hero, a sheep farm kid, threw the eponymous piece of wood, he stopped time and was able to thwart crimes and right other wrongs as long as it was airborne; once he caught it, life continued as before in his corner of the Outback.Unequipped with an Aboriginal hunting weapon, Julie (Renate Reinsve) in The Worst Person in the World wills time to stop so she can run across Oslo, passing freeze-framed foot and road traffic, to start a passionate Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The beginning of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is officially dated to 7 June 1967, the occasion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during the Six-Day War, but its origins stretch back further.The Palestine War, recognised by Israel as the War of Independence, and by Palestinians as the Nakba (literally, "catastrophe"), took place between 1947 and 1949, and it was nearly three decades earlier that the Mandate for Palestine was assigned, in 1918. For the date of the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, you need go as far back as 1897.Whatever Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a title, Coach to Vienna suggests an opulent Boule de Suif-like drama directed by Max Ophüls and starring the likes of Danielle Darrieux and Michel Simon. But Karel Kachyňa’s film is no Viennese waltz. It’s a bleak end-of-World War II drama in which a semi-conscious German soldier, Günther (Luděk Munzar), mutters about a woman, or women, he slept with – abused – in the “hellhole” of Ukraine. This long-buried 1966 Czechoslovakian New Wave gem is horribly relevant to 2022.Günther has been shot and is lying in the back of a two-horse hay wagon driven by its owner, a Czechoslovakian Read more ...