Film
Helen Hawkins
It’s easy to see metaphors about the status of modern Georgia, once again threatened by the Russian boot, in its recent artistic output. So while there are no overt political allusions in director Dea Kulumbegashshvili’s April, at its core you sense a tacit and urgent debate about how to square your conscience with the “rules” that govern the country’s conduct.The heroine of the piece is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an actual heroine of a sort. She’s an OB/GYN hospital doctor who risks her career by dispensing contraceptive pills and performing (illegal) abortions in remote villages for women in Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his cinema is mysterious ways, allowing the Portuguese director to tackle the themes that interest him: great love, colonialism, chance, destiny, death, and a dreary Portuguese world that is by no means willing to let anyone take away its history – or its stories.From the African romance-cum-colonial critique Tabu (2012) to the folk fable allegory of Portugal's financial crisis in his Arabian Nights trilogy (2015), Gomes frequently challenges the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As well as generating a ceaseless stream of albums, whether live, studio or culled from his copious archives, Neil Young has also amassed a fairly hefty body of film work, either as director, star or both. Like his music, his movies are created with a kind of confrontational spontaneity, grabbed on the run with rough edges and non-sequiturs still intact. His directorial debut, 1973’s only fleetingly coherent Journey Through the Past, gave early warning of what to expect.In the case of Coastal, there’s a directorial hand behind the camera, belonging to Young’s wife Daryl Hannah. She also Read more ...
Saskia Baron
As if penguins didn’t have enough to fret about with impending tariffs on exporting guano to America, here comes Steve Coogan to ruffle their feathers. The Penguin Lessons is a pretty loose adaptation of a memoir by Tom Michell, about his stint as a young English teacher in an ersatz British boarding school in Argentina.Casting middle-aged Coogan as Michell meant giving him a cursory backstory of a personal family tragedy to explain why his alternately louche and curmudgeonly character has sought employment abroad. Set against the backdrop of the 1976 military coup that led to the murders and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was born with the ability and the demon to write. I have been punished for it constantly.” Written and directed by Sinéad O’Shea, this fascinating documentary is a testimony to Edna O’Brien’s rebellious talent, her prolific output – a novel a year for a while – and her star-studded socialising. It includes archival footage, some of it against the backdrop of Irish politics, as well as final interviews in which she looks frail but still glamorous in a sequined indigo cardigan, recorded by O'Shea not long before O'Brien died last year, aged 93.The names of people she had affairs with, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A longshot of transgender Elvira (Volker Spengler) circled by gay men, assignation turning to assault as dawn mist rises from Frankfurt’s Main river, suggests Pasolini’s brutal 1975 assassination. Rainer Werner Fassbinder instead had in mind the suicide of his lover Armin Meier in May 1978.“He was like a wounded animal recoiling in pain,” his editor and last partner Juliane Lorenz recalls, withdrawing for a month to a friend’s flat, and finally emerging with a treatment for In a Year of 13 Moons. The finished work is bracketed by its dates of filming, 24 July 1978-28 August 1978, like a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a world of macho super-achievers like Jack Reacher and Ethan Hunt, maybe it’s time to hear it for the nerdy guys. The Amateur (based on a novel by Robert Littell) was made once before, in 1981, starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer and directed by Charles Jarrott. For this sleek remake, the director’s chair is occupied by James Hawes, who, among other things, directed the first series of Apple TV’s Slow Horses.Thus, perhaps he’s attuned to the misfits and renegades in the undercover world, though the opulently-equipped CIA in The Amateur is a far cry from the low-budget squalor in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Director Louise Courvoisier has put herself firmly on the film map with this story of young Totone and his little sister, carving out a living in the modern-day Jura countryside after being orphaned. Think the Dardenne brothers with more sunshine and less angst, a way of life where young calves are transported to market in the front seat of the family car.Courvoisier is from the village featured and cast her film from the locals working there. All are amateurs, all are naturals. Her Totone is a poultry farm worker, Clément Faveau, an 18-year-old with the ruddy cheeks and telltale half- Read more ...
John Carvill
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been charged with – let alone convicted of – any crime, Allen in 2025 is, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.So let’s deal with that first. The reason for Allen having suffered what McGilligan calls “the living death of being declared an unperson” has transmogrified over the years. Initially, he was weighed in the balance of public opinion and found Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between the evils”. Toshiro Mifune’s nameless rōnin pitches up a run-down village purely by chance, tossing a stick in the air at a fork in the road to choose which direction to take.Though taking place in mid-19th century Japan, the sets reflect Kurosawa’s love of classic westerns, the scruffy buildings facing onto a dusty main street. The presence of a dog carrying a severed hand is a bad omen, a dispute over Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he changed his name. This film directed by Marc Evans explains how it came about.PH Burton (played by Toby Jones) was the teenage Richard’s English teacher in Port Talbot, a wannabe playwright who, on the brink of fame when the war broke out, was deployed as a teacher instead. His tutelage turned the raw material that was Richard (Harry Lawtey) into the 1950s stage star with the burnished voice. The name change was suggested by an RAF friend of PH’s who was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s feature debut Restless, it’s visited on middle-aged nurse Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) by thirtyish Deano (Aston McAuley), the superficially affable toxic male who moves in next door with two mates and holds raves in their living room, “all night and every night”.A single mother whose son has just left for university, Nicky is pressed by her boss to work extra shifts at the understaffed care home for the elderly that employs her. In her downtime, she does yoga, watches snooker on TV, listens to classical music, and bakes cakes for herself. Read more ...