Film
Joseph Walsh
“The world is perfect. Appreciate the details” says a WU-PS driver played by RZA, in Jim Jarmusch’s gleefully meta zombie-comedy that has just opened the Cannes Film Festival. It’s good advice. Jarmusch’s latest work is a finely tuned, deadpan comedy that pulls no punches in sending up the clichés of the horror genre.At the centre of the story are three bespectacled small-town cops, played by Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny. Their dull daily routine of managing minor local disputes is interrupted by news that the earth has shifted on its axis (due to polar fracking). A local wild Read more ...
graham.rickson
Life in rural 19th century Estonia looks hard. The ice and the squalor are tough enough, but then you’ve the kratts to contend with. We see one in the eye-popping opening sequence of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 epic November, an unsettling creature cobbled from bits of wood, random tools and an animal skull. Resembling something thrown together by the Brothers Quay, this one’s on a mission, capturing a terrified cow and taking flight like a steampunk drone. In Estonian folklore, kratts can be given life if you offer three drops of blood to the Devil; the snag being that he now owns your soul.This is Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Imagine Cristiano Ronaldo, virtuosity intact, as buffed, blinged, and coiffed as ever, but with the sophistication and sexual maturity of an average seven-year-old, and you have a fair idea of Diamantino’s protagonist.If that sounds like this barmy Portuguese satire trashes the nation’s sleek football idol, it’s not quite the case. Yes, Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta, main picture) sees giant fluffy puppies frolicking in pink clouds when he dribbles toward the opposition goal, plus his duvet cover bears his image, but he dotes on both his old dad and his black kitten Mittens, and he has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This third version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ yarn of rival, class-warring con artists on the French Riviera is just something for Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson to do till a better gig comes along. The concept goes no higher than teaming them up, the execution considerably lower.The plot slavishly follows Michael Caine and Steve Martin’s 1988 Scoundrels duel, as crude Aussie Penny (Wilson) elbows into the well-appointed hunting-ground of sophisticated, English Josephine (Hathaway, pictured below). Josephine nonsensically attempts to oust the interloper by inviting her in, and seeing who can Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Recently, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder have found themselves in a career renaissance. Reeves has made a remarkable comeback as the dog-loving action-hero John Wick, while Ryder won audiences over as the grief-stricken mother, Joyce Byers, in Netflix’s 80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.The prospect of the duo being reunited following their past on-screen appearances in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Scanner Darkly and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is more than enough to trigger audience interest. After all, for a time they were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, who wouldn’t want to see them Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of the Pokémon franchise, bringing the video game’s cute critters into a live-action, film noir world, as Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) turns Holmes-hatted detective to help teenage human Tim (Justice Smith) find his apparently murdered dad. Their quest takes them through Ryme City, a utopia where Pokémon and people exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the beneficence of corporate chief Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy, whose Blofeld-like cat makes you doubt his motives early). The ensuing fight against corporate corruption of Pokémon-human relations is helped by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You are not the cat. You are inside the cat.” This has to be one of the most memorable first lines you’ll hear this year, and it belongs to one of the most singular films, an American indie drama that charts a teenage girl’s efforts to navigate mental illness, troublesome adults and a burgeoning talent as an actress – all through a theatre process in which reality and fiction become dangerously interlinked. An initially puzzling title is, therefore, perfectly precise, as the young Madeline attempts to find her voice – to be her own person – amid the frantic demands of others. And Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Claire Denis's High Life is science fiction as a fever dream rather than a frenzy of ray guns and aliens. Our first contact is Monte (played by a gaunt Robert Pattinson); he’s alone on a rickety space ship, fixing the leaks in the hull, nurturing both the crops in the biosphere and his baby daughter, Willow. Pattinson is a mesmerising screen presence with his close-cropped skull and sharp-angled jaw; there’s real tenderness in the opening scenes where he interacts with the infant as her sole parent. But that idyll doesn’t last; Monte is the last survivor of a crew of murderers Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first feature film by Brazil-born director Joe Penna (previously best known for his hit YouTube channel MysteryGuitarMan), but you’d never have guessed. Clocking in at a crisp and chilly 98 minutes, Arctic is an immaculately controlled exploration of the theme of man versus the elements, assisted immeasurably by having Mads Mikkelsen as its protagonist, Overgård.In a largely dialogue-free movie, it’s actions and landscape which define the development of character and story. We first see Overgård as he scrapes and shovels heaps of snow and ice to create a giant SOS signal which he Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benedikt Erlingsson (b.1969) was already an established theatre director and actor in Iceland when he directed his debut film, Of Horses And Men, an uncategorisable blend of humour, romance and horror, set away from Reykjavik amongst stubbornly individual, isolated farmers. Its indelible first scene, when a proud horse-breeder parades his prize steed to his neighbours, only for another horny horse to leap a fence for a shag with the mortified owner still on board, making him then shoot his horse in the head, shows Erlingsson’s talent for tackling radical shifts in tone with dry nonchalance. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Why make a feature film about Ted Bundy, the notorious 1970s serial killer when you’ve already made Conversations with a Killer, a four-part factual series for Netflix about him? A charitable explanation would be that it offered documentarian Joe Berlinger a chance to explore aspects of the story that could only be told with drama. A more cynical explanation would be that features outsell documentaries at the box office. Zac Efron plays the law student turned rapist and murderer who became as infamous in America as Jack the Ripper in the UK. It's thought that he killed at least thirty Read more ...