tue 29/04/2025

Film Features

Oscars 2025: long day's journey into 'Anora'

Matt Wolf

Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought increasingly crossed my mind as the 97th Academy Awards crawled towards its close, a promise early on from host Conan O'Brien not to "waste time" abandoned more or less as soon as it had been spoken.

Read more...

David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)

Nick Hasted

David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years preceding his death this week show the loneliness of his vision in his medium’s conformist capital, which he nevertheless adored. “It’s kind of a trick in the light [that] is magical,” he said of his adopted hometown’s allure.

Read more...

Best of 2024: Film

theartsdesk

 

Saskia Baron

Anora

Between the Temples

Io Capitano

Dahomey

Emilia Perez

Green Border

Io Capitano

Monster

A Normal Man

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Read more...

Documentary highlights from the 2024 London Film Festival

Saskia Baron

One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. 

Read more...

The law's sick voyeurism - director Cédric Kahn on 'The Goldman Case'

Hugh Barnes

The trial of the left-wing intellectual Pierre Goldman, who was charged in April 1970 with four armed robberies, one of which led to the death of two pharmacists, was known as “The Trial of the Century” – even though the century wasn’t over yet, as one of the prosecutors quipped.

Read more...

The Micro Golden Age of Mid Eighties Fantasy Films

Justine Elias

“When we hear the formula ‘once upon a time,’ or any of its variants,” wrote Angela Carter in her introduction to her Book of Fairy Tales, “we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. We say to children: Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.”  

Read more...

Best of 2023: Film

theartsdesk

Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preference


Saskia Baron

Anatomy of a Fall

Broker

Fallen Leaves

Joyland

Killers of the Flower Moon

Otto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror Story

Return to Seoul

St Omer

Scrapper

A Thousand and One

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: The Composers

graham Rickson

Unlike, say, Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Powell’s working relationships with musicians were cordial, particularly his collaborations with composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale.

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewing

Kristin M Jones

“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”

Read more...

Michael Powell: a happy time with Bartók’s Bluebeard

David Nice

In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: In Prospero's Room

Nick Hasted

There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: the glueman cometh

Graham Fuller

The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval pilgrims riding to seek blessings or do penance at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: Spy masters

Demetrios Matheou

Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.

Read more...

Powell and Pressburger: Battleships and Byron

Hugh Barnes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in securing finance for projects.

Read more...

Michael Powell interview - 'I had no idea that critics were so innocent'

Saskia Baron

Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.

Read more...

Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' - a triumph of personal filmmaking

Demetrios Matheou

Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Stratford - Messina FC scores o...

Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic....

Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters....

DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine is Light

All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary...

Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Wigmore Hall review...

I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’...

Simon Boccanegra, Opera North review - ‘dramatic staging’ pr...

Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as...

Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high

Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...

Album: Car Seat Headrest - The Scholars

Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Hamburg Repertoire

The blurb on the front of the double-CD set The Hamburg Repertoire says it collects “The original recordings of songs...

Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - mi...

“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events...