Film
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
India Lewis
Characterised by jarring juxtapositions of intense, appalling violence and the serene beauty of South Africa, Oliver Hermanus’ fourth feature is the story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality against the background of apartheid and prejudice.It's set in 1981, over a decade before homosexuality was legalised in South Africa, when any expression of same-sex attraction in the military meant a trip to Ward 22, where Dr Aubrey Levin subjected his patients to inhumane "treatments". The threat of this punishment hangs over the protagonist, Nick van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Aged 87, director Mike Hodges is due another revival, with Flash Gordon soon to join this Blu-ray resurrection of 1989’s Black Rainbow, an atmospheric, enigmatic Southern Gothic which, like much of his work, was barely released. Its prologue foreshadows the awful fate of travelling medium Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette), whose act with drunken manager-dad Walter (Jason Robards) becomes disturbingly real when she sees the dead ahead of time, interesting Tom Hulce’s reporter.Hodges’ career has been one of detours and dead ends, exploring quixotic routes and sometimes crashing, leaving lacunae Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The cakes look great, but it's back to the recipe books in almost every other way for Love Sarah, a subpar film from director Eliza Schroeder about the struggles of a west London patisserie in the age of Brexit. The emergence of Schroeder's feature filmmaking debut just now may benefit from a citizenry eager to get back out to their local baker. Alas, all the best will in the world can't override the gathering irritation of a story that often feels like a peculiar amalgam of Fleabag and Notting Hill, albeit without the necessary eccentricity or charm of either. It's giving Read more ...
Owen Richards
Scooby fans have waited over 50 years for a proper big screen adaptation of everyone’s favourite cowardly dog (sorry Cartoon Network’s Courage). The 2003 live-action version starring Matthew Lillard and Sarah Michelle Gellar failed to capture the paranormal-busting mystery of the TV series, and although the follow-up Monsters Unleashed recreated the classic villains, it was still a slog. But with a new CGI adventure from the studio behind The Lego Movie and the underrated Smallfoot, could Scoob! finally be the film Mystery Inc. deserve?Well, the plot certainly tries to squeeze in as many Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Gavin O’Connor has made a career out of sturdy films that make grown men cry. His best was Warrior - a hulking, tear-jerking tale of male fragility and addiction. His latest Finding The Way Back is a potent, raw drama that explores similar terrain and reunites him with Ben Affleck (they last worked together on The Accountant).This film was initially called The Has-Been. Like a stage-actor hearing the word "Macbeth", the average Hollywood actor might recoil at such a title. Which is a shame, as it encapsulates the sense of loss experienced by the central character Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Colombian director Franco Lolli’s debut feature Gente de Bien (2014) was a hit at several international film festivals, and Litigante should burnish his reputation further. It’s a carefully-observed family drama centred on the relationship between veteran lawyer Leticia (Leticia Gomez) and her daughter Silvia (Carolina Sani), a lawyer for Bogota’s Public Works department. Leticia is dying painfully from lung cancer while Silvia finds herself embroiled in a corruption scandal at work, all serving to pile the pressure on to their already fractious relationship.Lolli doesn’t preach or Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. He was uncompromising, never learning English or moving to Hollywood, however much he was cajoled by film types there.It appears he saw his non-film music as the serious work and posterity will no doubt give the verdict on that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice and Tokyo Story were released in 1952 and 1953 respectively. Tokyo Story regularly features in critics' Top 10 lists and was voted Best Film of all time in a 2012 poll of film directors in Sight & Sound magazine. The two films sit well together as a pair, each one a perceptive examination of human relationships set in a rapidly changing post-war Japan.Tokyo Story still packs a powerful punch, this tale of a retired couple visiting their self-obsessed urban offspring unfolding with piercing accuracy. Watching it after a gap of some years, I Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
If COVID-19 isn’t the only topic being tackled by creative folk at the moment, it certainly feels like it. That’s perfectly understandable, when the practical and emotional conditions of doing anything at the moment – in lockdown – invariably become, in some way, the subject.Who knows how many lockdown shorts have been aired on social media? But with Homemade, we have 17 made by a cracking collection of professional filmmakers from around the world. Like any compendium, some are stronger than others, but for the most part it’s a remarkably consistent assembly.As you’d expect, these directors Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Back Roads has languished largely unseen since its completion in 2017, and one can see why: lurid to the point of absurdity, this adaptation of a 1999 novel by co-screenwriter Tawni O’Dell is preposterously self-serious and doesn’t augur well for a hyphenate career for leading man Alex Pettyfer, the English actor (of Magic Mike fame) here doubling for the first time as director.Set in rural America with Louisiana standing in for the Pennsylvania of the book, the film tells of Harley (Pettyfer), whose first appearance suggests an Abercrombie & Fitch store model waiting to happen, Read more ...