Film
Adam Sweeting
Lockdowns must be good for something, right? British writer-director Rob Savage (a 2013 Screen International Star of Tomorrow, factoid fans) has made the most of the unwelcome imposition of our first national incarceration by creating a Zoom-powered horror movie, in which a group of six friends gather around their phones and laptops to stage an internet-powered seance.Previous films such as Unfriended and Searching have deployed computer screens to tell their story, but the idea of using Zoom adds a different dimension, and Savage has cannily exploited the parameters of the setup. The various Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo Mortensen), now living in LA with his husband Eric and their adopted daughter Monica.And that’s one of Willis’s more restrained outbursts. He’s tipping over the edge into enraged, foul-mouthed dementia. Yet somehow his son, a mild-mannered pilot (he was in the air force, not the army, as he reminds his dad) who’s trying to get him to move from his isolated farm in the snowy northeast, is a model of kindness and patience – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Using mobile phones, city-based drug dealers employ kids to ferry their product to rural areas or small towns, in this case Canvey Island and the Thames estuary.Blake was inspired to make the film by his experiences as a youth worker in east London, working at a Pupil Referral Unit for problem children excluded from regular schools. He has assembled an impressive cast of young up-and-coming actors, with Conrad Khan (pictured Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza that would draw virus-conscious punters back to the big screen. The assertion was always fanciful, the pandemic being too long a haul; with no disrespect to Christopher Nolan, the fanfare around his latest spoke more of industry desperation than reality.Meanwhile, along comes Mank, David Fincher’s account of the controversial genesis of Orson Welles’ landmark Citizen Kane, oft-cited as the greatest film ever made. It stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It was around the time of the 14th century Black Death that the word “corruption” – from the Latin corruptus, the past participle of corrumpere, “to mar, bribe, destroy” – was first associated with putrefaction. Moral corruption becomes inextricably entwined with fleshly decay in a cellphone video image of a dying hospital patient taken by a whistleblower that Alexander Nanau incorporated in his documentary Collective, which reveals the extent to which Romania’s state health system had become riddled with bribery by the mid 2010s.The male patient was attending the metalcore band Goodbye to Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In his exclusive half-hour-plus interview for distributor Second Run, the affable Tsai Ming-Liang makes a striking admission: “I make very uncommercial films.” Viewers of the extra will most likely have just finished Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bú sàn) (2003), Ming-liang’s feature-length exploration of precisely everything that comes of those pesky “uncommercial films”. That is, a decrepit, old picture-house on the outskirts of Taipei, hosting its last ever screening – of King Hu's 1967 sword-fighting classic Dragon Inn – complete, or incomplete, with leaky ceilings, and a thoroughly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The BFI has done an excellent job of giving La Haine the 4k restoration treatment under the vigilant eye of the film’s cinematographer, Pierre Aïm. From the opening image of planet earth being torched by a slo-mo Molotov cocktail to the shocking final moments, this is a stunningly handsome film. It’s hard to believe Matthieu Kassovitz’s blistering tale of three young men fired up by police brutality is now 25 years old as the film has lost none of its incendiary energy and style.Kassovitz sets the scene with an archive montage of the 1993 riots that broke out in Paris after the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Telling of a gay southerner called Frank (Paul Bettany) who is called back to his native (and bigoted) roots from the freedom he has found as a university professor in New York, Ball's narrative begins intriguingly before swerving towards implausibility and melodrama that not even the always-terrific Bettany and a distinguished cast can forestall. The film begins as a memory Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
You can practically smell the fumes coming off Thomas Vinterberg’s latest drama Another Round, known in Denmark simply as "Druk". Co-written with Tobias Lindholm, the story is anchored in a theory proposed by Finn Skårderud that humans have a blood alcohol level that is 0.05 percent too low. Therefore, to function at our best, we need to top it up. Four friends, all teachers at the same school, gather for a 40th birthday. Despite protests, Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) opts for soda and lemon over booze. However, the onslaught of jeers and teasing from his friends finally make Martin cave in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many have struggled to bring a new slant to the horror genre, but writer-director Brandon Cronenberg has managed it with Possessor, his second full-length feature. Being the son of David Cronenberg, a pioneer of so-called “body horror”, obviously didn’t hurt, but Brandon is shaping up as more than just a chip off the parental block.Possessor centres around Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an agent working for a sophisticated assassination corporation. Guided by her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Tasya hunts her prey by being implanted into the brain of an unsuspecting stooge, which she Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Published in June 2016, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy became a best-seller around the time of that November’s presidential election as people sought to understand why working class whites in the American heartland supported Donald Trump en masse. Vance’s account of his arduous upbringing at the hands of his drug-addicted single mother Bev incorporated his criticisms of the defeatist culture he grew up in. The film version directed by Ron Howard predictably focuses on the domestic upheavals endured by J.D. and his sister Lindsay. The socio-political context is submerged so deeply it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stylistically, Waxworks (1924) was the apogee of German Expressionist cinema in that it was the last pure distillation of the form, in which visual distortion, chiaroscuro, exaggerated staccato acting, and nightmarish atmosphere collectively evoked the angst-ridden German collective consciousness in the early years of the Weimar Republic.Waxworks proved influential, too, especially as an anthology film with horror elements. Yet it has never been as celebrated as such Expressionist classics as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), The Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922) Read more ...