Film
Nick Hasted
François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).Sexuality, gender and love itself prove variously slippery in The New Girlfriend (2014) and the violently different twins of L’Amant double (2017), while feminist equality powers Potiche (2010), the provincial Seventies comedy of umbrella factory strikes and elections with a sparring Depardieu and Deneuve. Ozon’s comfort Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction. She is Santosh (Shahana Goswami), wife of a handsome young policeman in a state that is apparently a disguised Utter Pradesh, where the film was shot. Hers is a “love marriage”, and her grief when her husband is killed on duty at an anti-police riot is palpable. As she Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.In addition, the story that Gints Zibalodis Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. Talking over Zoom from her home near Epping Forest, Apte, 38, quickly stresses that it wasn’t the film's topic of arranged marriage that made her sign up for Kandhari’s feature debut. What she loved about his script, she says, “is the wild and weirdly wonderful way it tackles the feeling of not fitting in, and the eventual journey of accepting oneself as one is with all the imperfections.”Apte’s Uma Read more ...
John Carvill
Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”There’s no discernible attempt on Rose's part to map her characters onto Tolstoy’s, but if we were to identify a potential analogue for Konstantin Levin, the moral centre of Anna Karenina, it would be Graham (Josh Radnor). A decent, introspective, socially awkward would-be actor and screenwriter, Graham inhabits the upper floor of his childhood home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation. Written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones etc) and directed by Steven Soderbergh, Black Bag keeps a tight focus on a small group of operatives from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.Superficially they might appear to be friends, and the film’s opening set piece finds them attending a dinner party hosted by George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (a glamorous and regal Cate Blanchett, pictured Read more ...
James Saynor
Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4.We meet the newly hitched – that is, thrown together – Uma and Gopal on a train to their new marital home (a small hut) on the ragged edges of today’s Mumbai. She sits bolt upright in the carriage behind her wedding veil; he is slumped out cold beside her. The wedding night is equally indecorous. As she starts to undress, he hurtles out the door as if he’s seen a scorpion. It sets Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film about African-American writer James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement not only put the Haitian-born Peck on the map as a director, but also made him one of the defining figures of contemporary black cinema.Since his debut Haitian Corner (1990), Peck has devoted himself to political topics, switching effortlessly between documentary or feature films to achieve a stronger factual or emotional impact. His work, he says, only serves one purpose: "I need to find a narrative, something that lasts and Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of The Barnabáš Kos Case’s incidental pleasures lies in its relatively accurate depiction of orchestral life. Much of the action in Peter Solan’s 1964 Slovak black comedy (originally title: Prípad Barnabáš Kos) takes place in a rehearsal studio, one filled with real, non-miming musicians. Actor Milivoj Uzelac, playing one of the conductors, was also a composer and actually looks convincing on the podium.If I’m allowed to be pedantic, the most glaring false note is the role played by the titular antihero; you’d never find a percussionist who only plays the triangle, let alone one who Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a saintly, courageous figure, of major historical significance. Those are good reasons to ensure that his story gets told and becomes better known. At a time when fanatical violent nationalism is on the rise and religion has been commandeered to support it, Bonhoeffer's work and his contribution to ideas have a renewed relevance.It is one thing to tell the story of Bonhoeffer's life, and quite another to tell it well and accurately. The film's director, Todd Komarnicki, who has been accused of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try.Before Twiggy, models were posh. They went to the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy in Bond Street and learned how to curtsey, pivot round an umbrella and get out of a car gracefully. In director Sadie Frost’s lively, likeable film, featuring many celeb talking heads including Paul McCartney and Dustin Hoffman, an alumnus, namely Joanna Lumley, looks back. “A Read more ...