Film
Joseph Walsh
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has made a career crafting perceptive and cerebral examinations of his native country. From his 2006 debut 12:08 to Bucharest to The Treasure, they were cerebral films that powerfully embodied the Romanian New Wave. With his latest film The Whistlers, Porumboiu shows he’s capable of being both a brilliant filmmaker and playful at the same time. It’s an impish noir thriller, full of femme fatales, crooked cops and sun-drenched islands. We begin on the island of La Gomera, the pearl of the Canary Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A documentary about six middle-aged Antipodeans, four women and two men, walking the 500 mile pilgrims’ path through France and Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela sounds uplifting, inspiring, even fun. Just the ticket, perhaps, when one's travel horizons are limited. But this soft-focus film fails to dig deeply enough into the lives and motivations of strangers thrown together with nothing much in common apart from grief, and sometimes not even that.Other film-makers have tackled the Camino de Santiago: Luis Bunuel’s surreal The Milky Way in 1969, Emilio Estevez’s The Way, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Curling could be an enigmatic contemporary noir, but for the fact that it was made in the depths of winter in rural Quebec. Shades of brilliant white and murky grey predominate, as witnessed in an early sequence where Jean-François and his 12-year old daughter Julyvonne trudge home from an optician’s appointment along a windswept snowy road. Spurning the offer of a lift from a police officer, Jean-François’s reluctance to engage with the outside world is established within minutes. A craggy, taciturn loner holding down a couple of menial jobs, he’s an over-protective single parent unwilling Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Featherweight is one thing, brainless is another. Can You Keep A Secret?, the romcom adapted by screenwriter Peter Hutchings from the 2003 novel by Sophie Kinsella, uneasily straddles the two until a conclusion that goes off the rails altogether and tumbles into the ludicrous. Alexandra Daddario plays Emma, one of these insecure chatterboxes you'd run a mile from in real life but whom we’re here apparently meant to find irresistible.That's certainly the effect Emma has on Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, stuck in the role of a walking pin-up), the smiling, hirsute stranger whom Emma ends Read more ...
Tom Baily
Alexander Tolotukhin’s debut film places the viewer into a microcosm of the first world war and frames the experience with a peculiar musical device. Spliced between grainy images of trenches, artillery strikes and field hospitals are shots of a contemporary orchestra preparing and then performing the soundtrack to the film. It is as though the tragedy of war is being dramatised and memorialised at the same time.The narrative follows a small Russian regiment as they prepare defensive strongholds against an oncoming German battalion. During an early gas attack, the main character Alexey ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Harvey Weinstein is never mentioned in The Assistant, but the former movie mogul and convicted rapist looms large over this savagely relevant drama, which offers a vivid picture of what life might have been like for every one of the employees – male as well as female, victim or no – trapped in Weinstein’s evil little world. Kitty Green’s film could be viewed as the indie counterpart to the recent Bombshell, which was first out of the blocks in the aftermath of #MeToo. Where Bombshell was a glossily-packaged, all-star satire, The Assistant is low-budget, low- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The great Chilean director Pablo Larraín specialises in dark psychological reflections on the past, notably his trilogy of Chilean dictatorship dramas – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No – and his English-language debut about the personal aftermath of the JFK assassination, Jackie.So Ema is a departure, a contemporary story, focused primarily on young people and with a familiar topic: parenthood. It’s looser, sexier, more playful than his other films. What remains, though, is the narrative invention, Larraín’s penchant for the diabolical twist, and the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Justice and the truth run on parallel lines in Anatomy of a Murder. If they converge at all, which is debatable, it's not because the moral order demands it, but because the workings of the law allow for that possibility. The outcome of Otto Preminger’s noir-tinged 1959 courtroom drama depends on which of two opposing attorneys has the pragmatism and cunning to prevail: James Stewart’s Paul Biegler, a former district attorney who favours fly-fishing over maintaining his practice in fictitious Iron City in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or George C Scott’s Claude Dancer, a slick operator Read more ...
David Nice
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme skill and nuance, deeply sympathetic or obnoxious according to the role, this extravaganza is much more about the gritty reality than the glamour of all those dances on the volcano. Not that there aren't glittering, decadent club sequences, but the harsh facts behind them never escape the directors' eyes."Directors", because there are three of them, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is what Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame co-creator Joe Russo and his Thor, Chris Hemsworth, did next. It’s a gritty solo project after the Avengers band broke up, attempting to recreate the lean ethos of a Steve McQueen action pic in contemporary Bangladesh.Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) is a burnt-out, maybe suicidal mercenary, haunted by his dead son, and happiest drunkenly lazing with mates in his (and Hemsworth’s) native Oz. When an assignment to retrieve an Indian drug dealer’s kidnapped son from a Dhaka rival goes disastrously wrong, he has to extract the boy past a city full of corrupt Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When Sea Fever premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, no one could have guessed its story about an Irish fishing trawler attacked by a giant jellyfish would in one respect prove prophetic. Toward the end of writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s low-key horror movie, self-quarantining becomes a bone of contention for what’s left of the crew. The creature latches on to the boat with its ghostly white limbs, turning patches of the hull into mush with its slime and spreading a lethal parasitic infection that plays havoc with victims’ eyes.However, no blame Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Oliver Hermanus’ potent fourth feature Moffie certainly has a controversial film title. A homophobic slur, it can be translated from Afrikaans as "faggot". If you were to see buses with film posters emblazoned with the title in translation, there might rightly be cries of outrage.But the charged choice of title is not unwarranted. The word rings throughout the script, but without the viewer becoming desensitised to its poisonous quality. It lashes like a whip every time. The power of Hermanus’ film comes through a drama that is charged with fear and hatred. Rendered as a tense Read more ...