Film
Markie Robson-Scott
Lisa, the kindergarten teacher in question (a mesmerising Maggie Gyllenhaal), is taking evening classes in poetry. Twenty years of teaching and raising her three kids, now monosyllabic, mean teens, have left her desperate for culture and a creative outlet. Her stolid husband (Michael Chernus) tries his best to be supportive, but he doesn’t really get it. “My teacher says I need to put more of myself into my work,” she sighs, as she picks at a dull salad at home in Staten Island after class. Well, that’s not going to happen.Director Sara Colangelo’s adaptation of a 2014 Israeli film of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a parental nightmare that’s virtually impossible to comprehend – a missing child. But however disturbing, that dilemma is not the chief concern of the Iranian writer/director Ashgar Farhadi’s latest drama. As ever, he’s interested in the psychological scars and relationship fault-lines that a crime or misdeed can expose. Farhadi is a master at building tension from moral dilemmas, behavioural detail, awkward family relations that are complicated by the past, by secrets, by lies. He’s won two foreign language Oscars, for A Separation and The Salesman, both set in his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You might think an American high school comedy an unlikely place to locate a love letter to Oscar Wilde – even if there’s a flamboyantly gay story behind it. But Freak Show screenwriters Beth Rigazio and Patrick J Clifton, adapting James St James’ source story, have a way with wit that is clearly aiming to match the writer whom they keep quoting. The fact that they sometimes try rather too hard doesn’t detract from the full-on experience that is producer Trudie Styler’s 2017 directorial debut, a film that sustains itself on the sheer over-the-top camp energy of its teenage hero, Billy Bloom, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been two relatively recent, welcome correctives in what is grandiosely referred to as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” – a move towards diversity (Black Panther) and a sharp injection of comedy (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok). With Captain Marvel the studio combines the two elements, resulting in one of the more breezily enjoyable and emotionally satisfying of the franchise. And in Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, it has an actress and a heroine ready to take over from Robert Downey Jr/Tony Stark/Iron Man as the Avenger’s top dog. What a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ray’s world has shrunk to a single room in a council flat. His life consists of drinking home-brew, smoking, gazing out of the window, listening to Radio 4 and sinking into an alcohol-induced stupour. There’s no need ever to leave his bedroom because his neighbour Sid does all the necessaries. A lone alcoholic asleep in a dingy room may not be the most gripping opening to a new British film Ray & Liz, but the scene is shot with such compelling attention to detail that a kind of squalid dignity is conferred on Ray’s solitary existence. The drama comes later when his estranged wife Liz Read more ...
graham.rickson
Marvel at Stranger in the House’s title sequence, the pulsating multi-coloured shapes accompanied by the cheesiest of title themes. It’s not Saul Bass, but it’s effective. Pierre Rouve’s 1967 film contains elements which may confound, irritate and annoy, though it fully deserves this handsome reissue in the BFI’s Flipside strand, with its mission “to rescue weird and wonderful British films from obscurity”. They don’t come much more weird and wonderful than this, with Hungarian émigré Rouve fresh from duty as executive producer on Antonioni’s Blow-Up. You can tell.Georges Simenon’s source Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mothers’ fears for and of their children are primal horror material: The Babadook and Under the Shadow set recent standards for exploring its emotional terror. Lee Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, has similarly profound subtexts in mind, and more fine actors as his mother and boy. The razor’s edge of ambiguity in The Babadook in particular, the nervous uncertainty of what is happening and who should be feared, is, though, less sharp.When Sarah (Seána Kerslake) brings her 8-year-old son Chris (James Quinn Markey) to a big, badly lit house on the edge of an Irish forest borrowed from the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You’d expect the man who created Peaky Blinders and the ingenious one-man-and-his-car drama Locke to have his ducks in a row and his feet planted securely on terra firma, but in Serenity Steven Knight seems to have permitted himself a leisurely mental vacation. It’s a tale of love, loss, multi-dimensional weirdness and a very large fish. Technically it’s a tuna, but really it’s a red herring in disguise.Our protagonist is Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), a bearded and sun-blasted fishing boat captain on the tropical island of Plymouth. Being McConaughey, he's also prone to showing us his Read more ...
mark.kidel
Hannah is a vehicle for Charlotte Rampling, and it's no wonder she won the Best Actress Award for her role at Venice in 2018. The film follows her as she gradually falls to pieces, without a trace of hysteria, slowly and surely, with her husband in prison for reasons that are never clear.Hannah works as a maid in a wealthy household, where she shows tenderness to a slightly disturbed child. She goes to an acting workshop that mirrors, in a strange way, her own increasing alienation, rather than nourishing her soul. There is a leak from the apartment above which she has to deal with. Her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it time for the rebirth of the old-fashioned wartime weepie? If so, this time next year The Aftermath will be dragging a clanking heap of statuettes round Hollywood, attached to the rear bumper of its 1940s army staff car. If not…A cynical person might summarise this movie as Brief Encounter Goes to the Third Reich, in which we find Rachael Morgan (a translucent Keira Knightly) stepping off a train in the bomb-flattened wasteland of Hamburg in late 1945, where she’ll meet her husband, British army colonel Lewis Morgan (stoical Jason Clarke, pictured below with Knightley). It’s a few months Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot uses irony and visual poetry to condemn his nation’s militarism. Twenty months after the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, it opens in the UK trailing a divisive history. When it first emerged in 2017, it was condemned as un-Israeli by then culture minister Miri Regev. She was subsequently barred from the ceremony for the Ophir awards (the Israeli Oscars), at which Foxtrot won eight prizes, including Best Picture.The film was designed as a triptych. The first section focuses on the grief of a well-to-do Tel Aviv couple, Michael and Daphna (Lior Read more ...
mark.kidel
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.Volume Two of the BFI’s monumental and impressive edition of Jarman’s video and film work will add to his status as genius and martyr. This lovingly assembled collection completes a remarkable account of the director’s work with the moving image, an extraordinary oeuvre as he was also writing Read more ...