Film
Nick Hasted
Werner Herzog’s appearance in The Mandalorian paid for this deadpan, documentary-like slice of extreme Japanese life, suggesting how the director’s amusingly doomy Teutonic persona now dominates his own cinema.Family Romance is a real company which takes Japan’s cultural ease with simulacra – from reconstructed historic houses to plastic models of food – to its emotional limit, faking family members and friends to order. Boss Yuichi Ishii plays a version of himself, employed to be the long absent dad of 12-year-old Mahiro (pictured below left with Ishii). In between replacing a drunken father Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. At under an hour and a half, Boulifa shows a gift for economic storytelling, but that doesn’t mean it comes without an emotional wallop. The story centres on two twenty-something mothers who have been best friends since school. Lynn is played by street-cast actress Roxanne Scrimshaw, who makes a startling debut, and Lucy by Nichola Burley (Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights), who delivers at Read more ...
mark.kidel
Criss Cross is a superbly taut film noir, a 1949 drama that unfolds with the inevitable downward spiral of ancient tragedy. Its doomed characters are prisoners of a hopeless struggle for freedom, caught in the web of their transgressive desires.Steve, whose tortured soul and desperado’s ambitions are beautifully rendered by Burt Lancaster, works for an armoured truck company. In a plan that feels doomed from the start, and in order to free Anna, the woman he loves passionately, from the clutches of the coolly ruthless gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), Steve offers himself as the inside man Read more ...
graham.rickson
Laughter in Paradise (1951) and The Green Man (1955) have plenty of incidental pleasures, even if neither film is quite the classic you hope it will be. Both have starring roles for Alastair Sim and his protégé George Cole – Sim’s lugubrious appearance and deadpan delivery being the best reasons for investigating this pair of Studio Canal reissues.Mario Zampi’s Laughter in Paradise casts Sim as one of the beneficiaries named in the will of practical joker Henry Russell (Hugh Griffith), the catch being that each of the four relatives has to undertake a task at odds with their character. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom. The wife of rural policeman Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) was driving, and the mystery of her death and open, infinite wound of their love consumes him during the course of this gripping dissection of damaged masculinity and desperate devotion.Ingimundur’s relationship with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, unsentimentally superb, pictured below) just about anchors him in the present. So too does his affectionate Read more ...
On the Record review - #MeToo turns its lens to the music industry, gives the mic to women of colour
Jill Chuah Masters
On the Record, the latest documentary from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (acclaimed directors of The Hunting Ground), dives into the sexual misconduct allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons, the so-called ‘Godfather of Hip Hop.’ It centres on interviews with Drew Dixon (pictured below), who — as a twentysomething music executive — launched Whitney Houston hits and scouted a young Kanye West. She left the industry after Simmons allegedly raped her.This is an elegant, stinging addition to the #MeToo dialogue, which gives due emphasis to black women and the music industry — a Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Dead and the Others won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018, perhaps due to the supreme devotion to subject and place that this macabre work exhibits. It is a film of startling visual power and mood, with a drifting storyline that becomes bizarrely captivating. Directors João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora spent nine months living with the Krahô people of northeastern Brazil, and their dedication has brought an anthropological touch to the drama.Part of the documentary effect comes from the directors’ patient observation of landscape. Shot in 16mm in a rural region of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Ten years in the making, Thomas Clay’s third feature, starring Charles Dance and Maxine Peake, is a remarkable and potent example of genre-splicing British independent filmmaking. The story opens in 1657. Cromwell is in power and, on a small, fog-bound farmstead in Shropshire, lives put-upon housewife Fanny Lye (Peake). Her much older husband John (Dance) is a bible-bashing brute who, with cane-whip frequently in hand, rules over the lives of Fanny and that of their child Arthur (young talent Zak Adams) with puritanical zeal. Their simple life is turned upside down by a young couple Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, it’s all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W. Young’s new documentary we are guided around New York’s rare book dealerships, and witness how, in the age of the internet, this rare breed may be going the way of the Gutenberg press.Whilst the impact of Amazon (specifically the Kindle) as well as Barnes & Noble are mentioned, the heart of Young’s work focuses on the dozen or so booksellers who are trying against the odds to make a living trading in leather-bound books and literary Read more ...
mark.kidel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany. The writer and director Céline Sciamma, who established herself as a unique voice and very capable filmmaker with films like Waterlilies (2008) and Tomboy (2011), explores once again the world of female passion.Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just been released from convent life and is destined to be married. She is impetuous, introverted and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the year when we should be reflecting on seventy years of peace in Europe but are too occupied with present day viruses, Brexit, and racism to remember our past, it’s timely that a film about the Allied victors occupying Berlin in 1947 should be given a rerelease. A Foreign Affair missed out on the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Cinematography to The Naked City, but Charles Lang’s aerial shots of a great city turned into a cross-hatched landscape of ruins provide a masterful opening to this neglected Billy Wilder black comedy. Looking down from the plane circling the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.Prudhomme appeared in the first half of Jeannette as the little girl shepherdess Read more ...