Film
Tom Baily
How could this story be told again? Director Todd Douglas Miller has found a way: strip away narrative and give the audience the purity of original record. The result is a gripping non-fiction experience that sits in a unique space between documentary, art, drama and dream.In collaboration with Nasa, Miller has unearthed hours of previously untouched film stock recorded during the first lunar mission in 1969. He has whittled the material down to a film of 93 minutes and combined it with Nasa audio recordings and an original synth-driven score by composer Matt Morton. No talking heads. No Read more ...
Owen Richards
Mari is one part kitchen sink drama, one part dance performance, bringing a refreshing take on bereavement and family. Dancer Charlotte joins her mother and sister at her dying grandmother’s bedside, and tensions rise as cabin fever sets in.Director Georgia Parris clearly understands how to film dance. The camera sways through rehearsals as bodies writhe in a cacophony of shapes. It’s hypnotic filmmaking, reaching crescendo in a dream sequence full of stark imagery. Her previous short films have focused on dancers, and this experience shows.Much of the film, though, is spent away from the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Al Reinert's For All Mankind isn't quite what it seems. In a famous 1962 speech, President Kennedy spoke of the knowledge to be gained and the new rights to be won on the moon to be "for all people", though the plaque left on the lunar surface by the crew of Apollo 11 states that the voyage was made "for all mankind". Reinert's 1989 film cleverly dubs "mankind" into Kennedy's speech in the film, not that you'd notice. What purports to be footage of a single Apollo voyage is actually a collage assembled from film shot on all six missions, plus a pre-Apollo space walk and a glimpse of the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Making it to the fourth film in a series and maintaining quality is a feat pulled off by very few franchises, (see last week’s dreary Men in Black: International). But Pixar has done it with Toy Story 4. It might not have quite as many nifty gags without its originator John Lasseter at the helm, but the quality of animation has reached new heights and the story reduced me both to tears and helpless laughter. The original Toy Story was the first animation feature created entirely digitally; almost 25 years later computer technology has made another huge leap forward. The opening Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The botched 1973 hostage incident which inspired the term Stockholm syndrome comes to flatly comic life here, the strange psychological phenomenon of captives falling for their captors over time being reduced to an absurd caper. Bringing out the insipid worst in Ethan Hawke as machine-gun wielding softie Lars, it remains watchable thanks to Noomi Rapace’s enigmatic, quivering power as the hostage he bonds with.Lars takes over a Stockholm bank one sunny morning, in a city here parodically pastel-coloured and post-hippie, with the radio dial agreeably set to Dylan in his country-rock phase (the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I’m sure there’s an anthropologist out there writing a thesis on American teenagers’ coming-of-age rituals as performed in movies, from American Graffiti to this year’s Booksmart. Such a study would be rich with observations about how the genre has evolved from 1973, when the leads were white, male and straight, through to 2019 when one of the leading ladies is a lesbian and the other one has a crush on a mixed-race heart-throb. Somewhere in between those two extremes falls Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, made in 1992 (but set in 1976). There’s only one black Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.It was a warm Roman evening in Casa Zeffirelli in September 2009. The grandest old man of the arts — who worked with Callas and von Karajan, Tennessee Williams and Toscanini, Burton and Taylor and Olivier, who had the ear of popes, princes and prime ministers — was now visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923. “Il maestro”, as Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There's something unsatisfying about the fact that Asif Kapadia's new documentary on the controversial 1980s sporting legend Diego Maradona has a two-word title. It would have created a neat synchronicity with his previous two films (Amy and Senna), but we soon learn why this is the case.Kapadia's central thrust is the dichotomy of the public and private lives of a superstar, whose legend even the uninitiated are familiar with. The private figure is Diego – a sweet (self-described) mummy's boy from the slums of Argentina who rose through the sporting ranks to become the greatest football Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The best joke in Men in Black: International happens before the film starts, when the iconic Columbia Pictures lady in a toga whips out a pair of familiar dark glasses. It’s a nifty, witty gag that doesn’t outstay its welcome, which is more than can be said for the feature that follows. The original stars are absent and there’s an absence too of the screwball humour that made the first film, back in 1997 such a hit. Gone is Agent Tommy Lee Jones with his dry wit (or his simulacrum in Men in Black 3, Josh Brolin) and gone is Agent Will Smith with his gleeful energy. Instead we have two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A starring role for Scrabble is one of the things that sets this small-scale but deceptively affecting film apart. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (a regular collaborator with Michael Winterbottom) based his script on his own short story, Triple Word Score, and with director Carl Hunter has developed it into a beautifully crafted meditation on loss and learning to live with your mistakes.The fastidiously-dressed Alan (Bill Nighy, doing a nicely underplayed Liverpool accent) is a tailor by trade and a Scrabble obsessive by choice. He’s also a bit of a con-man, as we learn when he hustles Arthur ( Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“When we were brothers we wanted more: more volume, more muscles, us three, us kings.” So begins documentary-maker Jeremiah Zagar’s faithful but watered-down adaptation of Justin Torres’s autobiographical coming-out novel, set in the 1990s.Zagar's first feature film, it stars sweet-faced Evan Rosado as Jonah, the 10-year-old narrator and youngest of the three brothers, all first-time actors giving stand-out performances. The movie lacks the book’s ferocious impact (best not to read it before watching) but, shot on 16mm film, it has a dreamy, lyrical beauty. Zagar cites Ken Loach's early films Read more ...