Film
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke and can only communicate through an iPad. The stairlift is in constant use, as is her bell. And there are jokes about pouffes.Set in suburban Dublin, it’s warm-hearted and charming in a lukewarm way, but although it’s based on Darren Thornton and his co-writer brother Colin’s experiences with their own mother, who had a degenerative disease, it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his deceased mentor Jean-Pierre, the film’s ambiguous ending suggests he might still share it with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Unless or until the gendarmes come calling.Jérémie is first seen driving to Martine and Jean-Pierre’s village in rural Occitania – where he was raised and trained – in a protracted scene rendered eerily oppressive by the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.The End is a dystopian musical about a rich family that found refuge in a bunker 20 years after an environmental catastrophe. The parents (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon), their grownup son (George Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”Coralie Fargeat, writer, editor, producer and director of The Substance, is discussing the “visceral journey” and extraordinary make-up effects in her body-horror genre movie, which won an Oscar for best make-up and hairstyling. It was also nominated in several other categories, and Demi Moore, as ageing Jane Fonda-esque TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle, won a Golden Globe award for best actress.A featurette, The Making of the Substance, is one of the extras in this MUBI Read more ...
Justine Elias
The typical Jason Statham movie character – muscular, resourceful, drily humorous – could probably carve an army into mincemeat using a few odds and ends nicked from the local Hobbycraft. In A Working Man, Statham’s second collaboration with writer-director David Ayer (The Beekeeper), the star defends the helpless with pickaxes and sledgehammers. And then he gets really violent.This time, Statham (Killer Elite, Ocean’s Eleven) portrays Levon (rhymes with “heaven”) Cade, an ex-SAS operator making a meagre living as a construction manager. Though the film’s graphic-novelish opening credits ( Read more ...
India Lewis
The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily beautiful salt mine are a mother (Tilda Swinton), father (Michael Shannon), son (George MacKay), their doctor (Lennie James), butler (Tim McInnerny), and friend (Bronagh Gallagher).The inhabitants of the mine are themselves preserved in salt, a sort of hermetic stasis that forbids the incursion of the outside world. The mother’s hair remains artificially Read more ...
Saskia Baron
La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.But if the trailer is a tightly-edited taster that whets the appetite, the film itself shows little evidence of the director’s ability to exercise similar restraint in the cutting room. At 139 minutes, La Cocina somewhat outstays its welcome, particularly with a series of false endings. To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.Based on British Beat writer Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, Lifeforce (1985) is indeed one of its decade’s most unhinged, far out films. Infamous and too easily dismissed for 18-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May’s mostly nude queen Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, Saltburn or Six Degrees of Separation. A clever young man with low social status infiltrates a far more privileged family, with devastating results. The difference here is that it's set not among American or European elites but in the booming economy of China with its high-tech citadels and international aspirations. The Tu family live in a luxurious apartment in an unnamed city; they want their only son, Wei (Muran Lin), to go to an Ivy League university but he’s more interested in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is a documentary portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed for his pioneering use of colour in the 1960s when only black and white images were taken seriously as an art form. My European Trip: Photographs from the Car, his debut show at MOMA in 1968 was a breakthrough. Hugely successful gallery shows around the world and countless books have followed. Meyerowitz has never lacked for acclaim and the opportunities that it can bring. When the World Trade Centre was attacked in 2001, he was the only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record of crime-dynasty epics including The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro is able to inhabit the gangster milieu merely by slipping on a favourite overcoat and homburg hat, but watching him play both Genovese and Costello here creates a sort of visual dyslexia.While his Costello feels like a fully-rounded Read more ...