Film
Graham Fuller
Stuttgart-born auteur and film theoretician Paul Leni, whose illusionistic production designs and direction of Waxworks (1924) helped define German Expressionist cinema, was 44 and approaching master status when he died of sepsis on 2 September 1929. Following its limited Christmas Day 1928 release, Leni’s final film The Last Warning, which was his fourth for Carl Laemmle’s Universal, had been released in January as both a silent and as a part-talkie, but it never won the critical acclaim of his seminal Hollywood horror classics The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An initially off-putting erotic comedy thriller about the relationship between a webcam dominatrix, “Scarlet” (Julia Fox), and the Internet gambler, Jack (Peter Vack), who becomes obsessed with her, Ben Hozie’s sexually graphic PVT CHAT becomes increasingly resonant as it proceeds – and surprisingly endearing. While mistress and slave are stepping in and out of their roles, they forge a tender online connection from what Jack believes is a distance of 3,000 miles – he lives in downtown Manhattan, she works (she says) out of San Francisco, The interaction of these hustlers elicits Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In the autumn of 1975, Martin Scorsese was finishing Taxi Driver, Bob Dylan began his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and Orson Welles’ F for Fake premiered in New York. Welles’ manipulation of found documentary footage of art forger Elmyr de Hory into a viewer-hoodwinking shaggy dog story has far more to do with Scorsese’s film of Dylan’s tour than, say, The Last Waltz.Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is a film of crude forgeries and exhilarating truths, fake interviews and vérité theatre, smoke and mirrors. Tipping the wink with its subtitle, and the opening, titular trick from Georges Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pushing 40, Simple Passion’s Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) lectures Paris college students on poetry and is single mother to pre-adolescent Paul (Lou Teymour-Thion). Blessed with a bountiful Deneuve-ian mane, she’s a pale but unfallen bloom in her late thirties passionately entwined, as often as she can be, with the younger Aleksandr (Sergei Polunin), a vulpine, taciturn Russian Embassy security operative (i.e. muscle), who sometimes flies home for marital vacations.“Even feminists become submissive when they fall in love,” the manstruck heroine tells her friend Anita (Caroline Ducey), blaming the Read more ...
Tom Baily
Kiwi and Aussie screen legends Sam Neill and Michael Caton have teamed up in this heartfelt and humorous remake of Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 Icelandic original. The template of Hákonarson’s story has been transplanted but all the details and fillings have changed. Director Jeremy Sims pitches us in Australian sheep country, a sunny and laconic world where life flows at a pretty breezy pace. Until disaster sweeps in.Brothers Colin (Neill) and Les (Caton) live on adjacent farms but haven’t spoken for years. Colin is kind and earnest, while Les could have dropped off the set of the 1970s psycho- Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Bliss gets off to a powerful start. Stressed-out Greg Wittle (an endearing Owen Wilson) is in his office, trying to do several things at once: draw his dream seaside home in great detail; talk to his daughter; renew his painkiller prescription by entering long lists of numbers in response to maddening robotic prompts, and get himself out the door to see his boss, whose assistant keeps demanding his presence with increasing urgency. Something is slightly off with Greg’s affect. “I have so many thoughts I wish you could see,” he tells his daughter on the phone. “Dad, are you sure you’re OK?” Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Do you want to spend 105 minutes trapped in a house with two people arguing, or do you already feel that your life under lockdown is quite quarrelsome and claustrophobic enough? If your answer is the former, then Malcolm & Marie is the perfect movie for you. Everyone else might be happier escaping elsewhere (I’d recommend Call My Agent if you want to enjoy actors talking about their trade. At least you get some exterior Paris scenes and lashings of wit). But let’s get back to the matter in hand. Forced to put their TV series Euphoria on hold because of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One hundred and seventy four years ago today, on Tuesday, 2 February 1847, the body of Virginia (“Sissy”) Poe, Edgar Allan Poe's 24-year-old wife, was interred in a vault in a graveyard near the couple's rented cottage in Fordham, in the Bronx; she had died of consumption (tuberculosis) the previous Saturday. Five years previously, Poe had been traumatised by seeing Sissy bleed from the mouth while playing the piano – the first sign she had contracted the “white plague” that had killed his mother when he was two, probably his foster mother, and possibly his brother (more likely a cholera Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried out by a pair of seemingly unwitting women at Kuala Lumpur airport by smearing Jong-nam (pictured below) with VX nerve agent.Ryan White’s documentary about Jong-nam’s death may contain material familiar to keen conspiracy fans, but it’s still an extraordinary story. White has buttressed his narrative with accounts from witnesses and lawyers, as well Read more ...
Saskia Baron
"A candied tarantula" is one of the many great descriptions of Truman Capote that light up this conventionally made but enjoyable profile of the American author most famous for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. Written and directed by first timer Ebs Burnough (formerly a public relations consultant and social secretary at the Obama White House), The Capote Tapes stitches together a rich array of talking heads and a wealth of archive to produce a chronological portrait of one of America’s first gay icons. To make his portrait, Burnough had access to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two genuinely lovely performances elevate an often-simplistic tale in Penguin Bloom, based on a 2016 memoir of the same name. Telling of the rehabilitation of an Australian athlete, Sam Bloom, who – true to her surname – learns to blossom anew following a terrible injury, this Netflix film is carried aloft by the integrity of leading players Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln. That same quality, alas, isn't always so apparent elsewhere.Screenwriters Harry Cripps and Shaun Grant have gifted the narrative chores to Griffin Murray-Johnston, who plays Noah, the eldest of the Blooms' three Read more ...