Film
Saskia Baron
This documentary about the 1970s activist movement Rock Against Racism comes with festival prizes and much acclaim. It’s certainly a nostalgic feast for those old enough to remember when punk and reggae musicians were purposely united and it’s a timely release in the age of Grenfell, Windrush and Brexit. The filmmakers behind White Riot doubtless intend not only to celebrate the surviving veterans of a heroic movement, but also to encourage the current generation faced with resurgent racism. Director/editor Rubika Shah pays heartfelt homage to the now greying radicals who, as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire, which opened five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was closely adapted from Graham Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett and directed for Paramount by the veteran William Tuttle. Though no masterpiece, it's a film noir landmark – an essential watch.Noir style wasn’t yet fully established, but there are glimmerings of them here in cinematographer John Seitz’s low-key lighting and Hans Dreier’s disorienting sets. The film’s fatalistic tone was marred by touches of comedy, a near-Gothic interlude Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Beavis and Butthead’s vicious grunge-era gormlessness remains interred, Wayne and Garth (and their stars’ careers) are too superannuated to revive. But here are the slightest of Gen X’s idiot double-acts, back again to save the universe in a time-travelling phone-box.Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) were only ever cult hits, giving no studio impetus for this third film, whose script was being hawked around nine years ago. Keanu Reeves (Ted), Alex Winter (Bill) and original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon instead made it as fans of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
September 18th is the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, an appropriate moment to release Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary exploring the vexed question: was it murder, suicide or a tragic accident? Trying to unravel this conundrum, director Tim Conrad sifts through the evidence, speculates about the crucial unknowns and, rather unconvincingly, creates possible end game scenarios. But groping around in such murky waters only stirs up a lot of mud and the death of the world’s greatest guitarist remains stubbornly obscure.The post-mortem found that Hendrix drowned in his own vomit Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most painterly and ominous sequence in Nocturnal naturally occurs at night. Until recently strangers, 33-year-old Pete (Cosmo Jarvis) and 17-year-old Laurie (Lauren Coe) gaze across a body of seawater to a miniature chemistry set – a tract of illuminated industrial buildings and smoke-belching cooling towers. Initially these bright satanic mills occupy the foot of the frame, the rest of it a vast black void; then they glide disarmingly close to Pete and Laurie as he drives among them.Perhaps the film’s director Nathalie Biancheri and its inspired cinematographer Michal Dymek intended Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rocks is a beautifully made slice of neo-realist filmmaking which deserves to get a wide audience but may well slip off the radar in the current climate. It really should be experienced in a cinema as the camerawork by Hélène Louvart is stunning and the sound design is excellent.Co-written by playwright Theresa Ikoko from her original story, it follows a few days in the life of Rocks, a 16-year-old girl growing up in Dalston. It’s the end of the summer holidays and her widowed mum is having mental health problems and has taken herself off. She’s left a bit of cash and a note saying that she Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s no denying the Faulknerian ambition to the construction of Anthony Campos’ latest feature Devil All the Time. It’s a brooding, blood-soaked Semi-Southern Gothic drama spanning two generations through a plot that wrestles with the nature of good and evil like Jacob at Penuel.The film takes place in the wake of World War II and up to the outbreak of war in Vietnam, a time when the media would become weaponised as never before in the US. The pernicious nature of media was central to Campos’ previous works, Simon Killer (2012) and Christine (2016), but in The Devil All the Time, he Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Michael Gira, Swans’ band leader and last remaining original member, has a reputation for being an intense and difficult individual who doesn’t compromise easily. This is illustrated by the band having been home to some 35 different musicians since its 1982 beginnings in a desolate and dangerous New York City. However, as one-time drummer Bill Rieflin has said: “Michael is a singular creator and that puts him in a world where there are few members.” He is also clearly much respected by many of his former band mates, as many of them turn up as talking heads in Marco Porsia’s documentary of one Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kantemir Balagov’s second feature announces the arrival of a major new talent in arthouse cinema. Made by the Russian director when he was just 27, and premiered at Cannes last year, where it won in the “Un Certain Regard” strand, Beanpole approaches its bleak aftermath-of-war story with all the practised subtlety of an established auteur while delivering an emotional impact that is empathetic and shocking in equal measure.Set in 1945 in Leningrad, months after the end of the Great Patriotic War at a time when any elation of victory has given way to an understanding that the future will be Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
If there was ever a balm for these confusing times, then it’s Max Richter’s Sleep, a lullaby of a documentary that explores the composer’s eight-hour-plus experimental 2015 composition based on sleep cycles. Richter is a remarkable musician and, alongside his experimental albums, has also been responsible for some of the most moving film scores of recent years, such as Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival and James Gray’s Ad Astra. Yet Richter is far from a jobbing composer: his work is always imbued with a deeper meaning, and his passion is infectious.Five Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Remember when romcoms didn't try so hard? That question kept going through my head for the first half, or more, of Broken Hearts Gallery, a film from Canadian writer-director Natalie Krinsky that ultimately in tugging at the heart but has to go through some fairly tortured narrative hoops to get to that point. It's the incidental pleasures that accrue this time round as opposed to the inevitable genre tropes. Who would have thought, for instance, that a passing reference to Kenosha, Wisconsin, would have an entirely new and troubling resonance by the time of this film's release? At such Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Not to be confused with Savages, the Oliver Stone film of 2012 about marijuana smuggling, Savage is a story of New Zealand street gangs: how to join and how to escape, which, when you’ve got the words Savages and Poneke (the Maori name for Wellington, where the film is set) tattooed on your face, like Danny, aka Damage (Jake Ryan), is not going to be easy.There’s a lot of standing around in the dark beside fires in braziers in scabby back yards, beer-drinking, claw-hammer-wielding and endless grunting of the F and C words. Most of the gang-members, impressive though they look (many of them Read more ...