Film
Matt Wolf
The 91st Academy Awards began with a rousing concert appearance from Queen to kick off a show from which Bohemian Rhapsody led the field with four trophies. Three host-free hours later, the ceremony got a surprise shot of adrenaline from the unexpected Oscar that went to The Favourite’s Olivia Colman for playing a queen. What came between was a scattershot affair marked out by numerous Oscar firsts, repeated standing ovations – from that Queen opener to Rami Malek’s prize for playing Freddie Mercury – and a shorter and sometimes sharper Oscars: a good half-hour or more had been shaved from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How does the ever cherub-cheeked Alex Lawther keep getting served in pubs? That question crossed my mind during the more leisurely portions of Old Boys, an overextended English schoolboy revamp of Cyrano de Bergerac that flags just when it most needs narrative adrenaline. Age 23 now but playing someone far younger in the film, Lawther plays a scholarship student called Amberson, who appears to inhabit various pubs with nary a question asked. Audiences, meanwhile, may have questions of their own about how such a promising idea was allowed to dissipate to this degree. The setting is a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s another night in an emergency services dispatch room in Copenhagen. Policeman Asger Holm has been taken off active patrol pending a conduct investigation and is stuck on the phones. Drunks, druggies, posh blokes complaining of being mugged in the red light district, he’s pretty brutal with these time-wasters. Then a call comes in from a desperate woman. She's pretending she’s phoned her child but has been kidnapped by a man who’s driving her to an unknown destination. Can Asger work out where she is, keep her on the line, and get the patrol car to her in time?The Guilty is a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An angry little boy, in jail after stabbing someone, stands in a Beirut courtroom and tells the judge that he wants to sue his parents. Why? For giving birth to him when they’re too poor and feckless to care for him. And he wants them to stop having children.Fair enough. Director/writer Nadine Labaki’s Oscar-nominated third film – it also won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year - is in a different league to her two previous quite jolly features, Caramel and Where do we go now? It is a passionate indictment of the plight of Lebanese street children. Unregistered and without birth certificates Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
Owen Richards
A British boys boarding school in the 1980s. Not the most obvious setting for a romantic comedy, especially one based on the most famous romcom of all, Cyrano de Bergerac. But for director Toby Macdonald, it was the ideal challenge for his debut feature following the BAFTA-nominated short Heavy Metal Drummer.Old Boys stars Alex Lawther as Amberson, an unpopular squirt of a boy struggling to wade through the school’s various allegiances and sports. Life takes an upturn on the arrival of Agnes (Pauline Etienne), the daughter of the new French teacher. She’s interesting, arty, and quite honestly Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When the world is as crazy as it is right now, its political life dominated by dolts and villains, it needs a new kind of hero. That’s why Americans are embracing an octogenarian woman with more guts and integrity than virtually anyone at her level of public life, and why in quick succession we’ve had two films about her. The Oscar-nominated documentary RBG was released in January and is still available in some cinemas and on streaming platforms. It tells the story of the now 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a remarkable woman who in the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As journalists and critics were enjoying the unseasonably balmy weather in Berlin at the 69th Film Festival, all were wondering – where are all the good films? Surely outgoing festival director Dieter Kosslick would want to conclude his 18-year tenure by going out on a bang? Apparently not.Berlin has never had the glitzy attraction of Cannes or the Oscar-hungry titles of Venice and Toronto. Still, journalists and critics have flocked to the German capital each year. This is because Berlin is a festival where you expect to find challenging, demanding, and revitalising cinema. Cinema that gets Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is nothing quite like the Iffland-Ring in this country. The property of the Austrian state, for two centuries it has been awarded to the most important German-speaking actor of the age, who after a suitable period nominates his successor and hands the ring on. There were only four handovers in the entire 20th century. The most recent of them was in 1996, when the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz became the new lord of the ring. But once all the accolades have been handed out, there is one role above all for which Ganz, who has died at the age of 77, will be overwhelmingly remembered.No one put it Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin lived such a fearless life that it's a shame this celluloid biopic isn't correspondingly brave. Sincere to a fault and bolstered by a blazing performance from an impassioned Rosamund Pike, Matthew Heineman's film suffers from a script by Arash Amel that seems incomplete at best and often doesn't seem to exist at all, apart from some none-too-plausible platitudes and the hagiography that one might expect and that Colvin herself, one imagines, would instinctively mistrust. Visually, it startles throughout, beginning at the site of Colvin's Read more ...
mark.kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Arthurian legend’s tight fit as a Brexit allegory perhaps proves how timeless it is as, buried and bound in the earth by Merlin, Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) senses the land above is “lost and leaderless”, and ripe for her apocalyptic return.This ripped from the headlines quality to The Kid Who Would Be King is largely coincidence, director Joe Cornish has claimed. When he had the germ of this idea as an ‘80s teenager, giddy with the possibilities of splicing E.T. and John Boorman’s Excalibur, Britain and the world were quite riven enough. The myth of a king also buried in the soil, to be Read more ...