Film
Helen Hawkins
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This Bridget can bring the pinprick of tears to the eyes as well as make you laugh.The first generation of Bridget fans, like her creator Helen Fielding, are now in their sixties and beyond, and possibly experiencing, like Bridget (and Fielding), the loss of a partner through divorce or death. Bridget’s beloved Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, pictured below with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct crime novel has been long overlooked, High and Low taking in corporate politics, familial tensions and a thrilling race to catch an enigmatic villain.Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a senior executive at National Shoes. He's at odds with other board members seeking to cut costs by producing cheap, short-lived footwear (“shoes must Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden directorial debut. Animal lovers will want to avert their eyes. The film is undeniably powerful, with fine performances, but the unremitting violence ends up feeling cartoonish and empty.Set in the west of Ireland, the mountainous landscape is magnificent. Its sheep-farming inhabitants, not so much. In the first scene, a flashback, Michael ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.September 5 encapsulates all of that, bar the virtue perhaps, and with the concrete deadline replaced by another practical pressure – of live broadcast – and the ethical decisions that arise when the story in front of the camera is literally one of life or death. Tim Fehlbaum’s film is based on the terrorist attack on the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, in which Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a crowded trolleybus and his guilty hunt for what becomes a murder weapon provide the narrative, and sharp-featured young Mifune’s coiled performance, alternating mimed grace with feline fierceness, is the arrow carrying it to its bruising conclusion.Kurosawa and Mifune are still defined in the West by Rashomon and Seven Samurai, breakthrough Fifties Read more ...
David Nice
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible to be both more or less simultaneously – packs years of grievances and unacceptable verbal abuse into a very short period of time.Fortunately Marianne Jean-Baptiste is on hand to elevate the attacks to sacred monster level – plenty of laugh-out-loud lines, and I won’t spoil what fun's to be had by quoting any – and to make the pathos real. Pansy‘s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was forced to lay low.Now he’s directing a short drama for a few university students in Seoul in a class taught by his niece, the reticent, charming Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), who’s asked him to help out, though she assumed he’d say no. The previous director has just left due to embarrassing circumstances – he dated three of his students separately, so they’ve Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Mel Gibson probably made Flight Risk with Netflix’s “90-minute movies” slot in mind (in fact he overshot – it lasts 91 minutes). It hits the spot of “escapist no-brainer action flick” by being lean, sharply-focused and amusingly preposterous, and Gibson keeps the pace brisk enough that you don’t have time to dwell on the really daft bits.Perhaps taking a cue from Three Men In a Boat, Flight Risk is Two Men and a Woman on a Plane. The latter is a battered old Cessna in which quite a few gadgets don’t seem to work properly. It’s flying deputy US Marshall Madolyn Harris (Michelle Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.Soderbergh’s elliptical editing proffers a gradual, jigsaw portrait in scenes of parental boozing, rival siblings and Rebecca’s legal laxity. Chloe is meanwhile Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s a moment, as we build to a climax in Brady Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), when a servant at a grand house unwittingly nudges a candle into the path of a dangling curtain pull. The tassel ignites, unseen by gathering dinner guests.Then something happens that’s rare in the annals of film. In fact, nothing happens. The drapery is not particularly flammable and, unseen by anyone in a lingering wide shot, burns itself quickly out. This dog-that-doesn’t-bark, tree-falls-in-a-forest moment is, it turns out, signature Corbet.He’s a maker of perplexingly non-flammable Read more ...