Film
Demetrios Matheou
A creepy lighthouse on a remote island, a blistering storm, a mermaid languishing on the shore and two fabulously bewhiskered actors chewing up the scenery like there’s no tomorrow. The Lighthouse feels like it’s been washed up in a bottle, a film from another time with a story sprung from ghost stories or nightmares.The American writer/director Robert Eggers really knows how to create mystery and a particular sense of unease. He follows his outstanding debut, the pre-Salem horror film The Witch, with another deeply atmospheric concoction, which doesn’t really feel like horror Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a palpable rage to Melina Matsoukas’ first feature film Queen & Slim, starring Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. Cast in the mould of Bonnie and Clyde, it’s a film that has you clinging to the arms of your seat from the first fifteen-minutes. In the opening scene, we learn that Turner-Smith’s character - called Queen for the majority of the film - is a defence lawyer who has recently lost her client to the death penalty. She’s on a Tinder date with Slim (Kaluuya), to distract herself. On the way home in Slim’s car they get pulled over by a trigger Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Mark Jenkin’s black and white masterpiece about clashes between incomers and locals in a Cornish fishing village was made on a 1976 clockwork Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound – all that’s added later, including the actors’ voices – and hand-processed by him in an old rewind tank in his studio in Newlyn. The award-winning result is timeless (he did start writing it 20 years ago), hypnotic and extraordinary – huge, hyper-real close-ups and grainy 16mm film stock popping with sparkles and flashes, plus an excellent cast and a powerful story-line.Fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) has no boat, Read more ...
Owen Richards
What’s the appeal of cinema? It can transport us to fantasy lands, or open our eyes to new perspectives. But one aspect that’s less discussed is how it brings people together. Going to the cinema is a social stimulus, a shared experience that sparks discussions and forges friendships. And as shown in Sudanese documentary Talking About Trees, its absence leaves a hole in the community.We follow the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), a collection of former filmmakers, as they try to reopen the Revolution Cinema in the city of Omdurman. It’s more than a hobby for them, it’s a calling. Since the military Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Armando Iannucci’s move away from the contemporary political satires that made his name, first signalled by his bold, uproariously brilliant Death of Stalin, continues apace with a Dickens adaptation that feels quietly radical. It’s not just the colour-blind casting, which includes Dev Patel playing the young hero; the most striking thing about Iannucci’s Copperfield is how gloriously exuberant it is. While not turning away from the social concerns and personal cruelties that permeate Dickens’ work, Iannucci cranks up the comedy, humanity and sense of community of David Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 18-year-old Japanese horror hit Ju-On (The Grudge) was remade once before, as – yes – The Grudge (2004), with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now it's re-rebooted in this stylishly photographed but fatally crass incarnation directed by Nicolas Pesce, who is of the view that if something is scary once, keep repeating it ad nauseam.It’s the story of number 44 Reyburn Drive in Cross River, Pennsylvania, a house cursed with a spirit of murderous rage. This passes on to anyone who enters, having made its way to the USA from Tokyo by attaching itself to Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood), who, rather Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Terrence Malick returns to his former greatness following three features of unscripted, all-star poesy, with this sombre biopic of sainted Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl). A farmer who refused to swear the Hitler Oath when called up, Franz remains beatifically strong in Nazi jails, rejecting the compromises that could save him. His wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), the initial source of his profound Christian faith, is ostracised alongside their young daughters for his pains, in scenes of sullen mob cruelty worse than his physical torture.Malick’s inveterate Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Just Mercy, the latest film from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12), is based on a New York Times bestseller. It has a star-studded cast. It’s emotionally moving as well as intellectually accessible. But it’s no easy film to watch. “They can call it what they want – it’s just another way to lynch a black man.” Just Mercy is about death row in the American South, and it is a bruising and beautiful film. It lights a fire under you.Just Mercy is based on a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, an American civil rights attorney who has spent his life working with adults and children condemned to die in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Trey Edward Shults’s extraordinary, music-driven third feature, set in a sparkling south Florida, stars a wonderful Kelvin Harrison Jr as 17-year-old Tyler, an African American high-school wrestler with bleached blond hair. Harrison was in Shults's It Comes At Night (he also starred in Luce); they have a close relationship and collaborated on the Waves story. This is worth mentioning as Shults is white and to impose his semi-autobiographical narrative on to a black family might otherwise be seen as problematic, as indeed it has been in some quarters.This is an exceptionally powerful movie, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With Harvey Weinstein about to go on trial, the timing is particularly apt for a film that outlines the fall from grace of another media giant who used his powerful position to sexually victimise women. The late Roger Ailes was the CEO of the right-wing, Trump-supporting Fox News, who was massively influential in American media and politics until forced to resign, in 2016, in the face of sexual harassment accusations by a raft of female staff.Bombshell captures the toxic environment inside the Fox News building, where Ailes would advance or terminate a woman’s career on the basis of sexual Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s debut feature, and the film must somehow reflect the parabola of the Israeli-born director's life: it’s set between Berlin and Jerusalem, the two cities apparently closest to him, and one of its main subjects – alongside weightier themes such as grief and loss – is food, especially the rich experience of cooking. (Graizer’s biography records how he studied film, as well as – a phrase you don't expect to find in such contexts – “trained in kitchens as a cook and will soon publish his own Middle Eastern cookbook”.) The result is independent cinema at Read more ...