Film
Graham Fuller
Common to the recent spate of films about aspiring singers, the theme of fame’s corrupting influence is hardly new. However, actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux daringly freights this biographical sub-genre with cosmic significance, as he did the history movie with his 2015 directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader. Corbet gambles in likening celebrity crises with real-world catastrophes, but the implication that they stem from the same universal malaise strikes a chord.Vox Lux visits Celeste Montgomery in her early teens, when she is played by English actress Raffey Cassidy, and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
What is it about Nordic women and the environment? Hot on the heels of the London visit by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg – the most inspiring climate change campaigner since Al Gore – comes this timely, singular, enormously enjoyable comedy-drama from Iceland, whose heroine is another no-nonsense Nordic eco-warrior, albeit one with a very different modus operandi than young Greta. Halla (Halldóra Geirharosdóttir) is a middle-aged choir conductor, with a double life as an environmental activist whose exploits win her the moniker, ‘the mountain woman’. We first see her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
graham.rickson
The packaging suggests that Radu Jude’s Everybody In Our Family (Toată lumea din familia noastră) is a dark romp, one source describing it as a “chaotic yet endearing comedy chamber piece”. And no one would dispute the sheer craft on display, Jude’s hand-held camera capturing in real time a seismic family breakdown. The performances are magnificent, the direction brilliant, but watching this 2012 film is a gruelling experience. It was the third feature from the Romanian director, whose most recent work, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), brought him considerable Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien follows the same formula of many literary biopics, with a tick-box plot of loves, friendships and hardships that forged the writing career of one the 20th Century’s greatest fantasy writers.We open at the Western Front, as a feverish Tolkien doggedly makes his way through the trenches with trusty companion, Sam (Craig Roberts) – a proto-Samwise Gamgee, complete with West Country accent - looking for his schoolfriend, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle). Blasts of German flame-throwers transform into dragons, and caped cavalry officers shape-shift into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a romcom of two radically different halves, vaulting so dizzyingly from insultingly unbearable to daringly hilarious that walking in half-way through becomes a viable option.It begins as a grim case study of the patriarchal odd couple, as schlubby gonzo journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) becomes the unlikely speechwriter then unbelievable lover of immaculate presidential hopeful Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron). Hollywood’s touching interest in improving nature’s stacked odds against such coupling noticeably dims when the genders are reversed.The flat cinematography, jolly synth Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Khrustalyov, My Car! comes, infamously, from the words uttered by NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria as he departed the scene of Stalin’s death in March 1953, and Alexei German’s film comes as close as cinema can to dissecting the surreal terror of those times, indeed of the Soviet era itself. It's the work of an extreme auteur at the height of his unpredictable powers, shot over the course of some five years in the mid-1990s, the official interference that had dogged German's Soviet-era films a thing of the past. Its hallucinatory power looks as striking as ever in this Arrow Academy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The latest from the prolific Sergei Loznitsa, Donbass is a bad-dream journey into the conflict that’s been waging in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, barely noticed beyond its immediate region. The titular break-away region, also known as “Novorossiya” (New Russia), is under control of Kremlin-backed militias, fighting the Ukrainian army commanded by Kyiv. But Loznitsa – the director was born in Belarus, raised in Ukraine, and studied film in Moscow, a personal history that surely gives him a perspective on both sides – has not made a war film as such: rather Donbass offers a series of vignettes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Mediterranean’s massacres of the refugee innocent come uncomfortably close to a lone female sailor in this stark parable of European helplessness and indifference.When German doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff) casts off from Gibraltar, the ocean’s vastness seems a challenging backdrop for a testing voyage. For a while in Wolfgang Fischer’s austerely beautiful film, she is silent and peacefully alone, relishing her freedom. When a storm rolls in, and her ship repeatedly slips into the trench between waves with her at the helm, Robert Redford’s lonely stoicism as the sailor of a sinking ship in Read more ...
graham.rickson
This Blu-ray reissue brings sci-fi masterpiece Ikarie XB 1 back to its original visual glory, with the 1963 film presented here in the 4K restoration first shown at the Cannes festival in 2016 (distributor Second Run had previously released an earlier restoration on DVD in 2013). Just how good the film looks in its latest incarnation can be observed when it's compared to the title and closing sequences recut for the film’s English language dub that are included as bonus features. Both are distinctly dim and scratchy, though worth watching to see what happens at the very close, Czech Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Earth’s mightiest defenders are back in a triumphant climax, 11 years in the making. Despite a three hour runtime and an overstuffed preceding chapter, the Russo Brothers pull off the near-impossible by creating a wholly satisfying final chapter, and possibly the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.When we last saw the Avengers, all hope was lost. Half of all life in the universe was turned to dust. Tony Stark and Nebula were adrift on a distant planet. Earth’s remaining survivors were left to contemplate their failures. How they each deal with this speaks volumes about their Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Hey guys, it’s Kayla, back with another video. So, the topic of today’s video is being yourself.” Kayla Day (the wonderful Elsie Fisher, nominated for a Golden Globe and also heard as the voice of Agnes in Despicable Me) is in her last week of eighth grade in upstate New York, compounding the horror of being 13 years old by making self-help YouTube videos in her bedroom. “As always, make sure to share and subscribe to my channel. Gucci!” she signs off chirpily, with Enya’s Orinoco Flow as surprisingly effective background music. But is anyone watching?This directorial debut from stand-up Read more ...