Film
Sarah Kent
Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main picture) and ideas pour out faster than she can realise them, even though she works all day, six days a week. She must be the most prolific artist alive; she is also one of the most popular. People queue for hours to gain entry to her exhibitions and last year she opened her own five-storey gallery in Tokyo. The main draw are the infinity Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The straw hat is surely the season’s requisite headgear for great actors embarking on their valedictory screen performances. It was there on the venerable Harry Dean Stanton’s head through much of Lucky, and the great John Hurt makes it his own in Eric Styles’ That Good Night, his last lead film role (his cameo in espionage thriller Damascus Cover hardly counts). As its title, drawn from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem about death, suggests, the whiff of mortality is strong, and so is the sense of a script creaking, dramatic impact sustained principally by the charisma of a master.“The horizon Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Writers need to write, or so goes the unimpeachable argument that underpins The Wife, which is being strongly touted as the film that may finally bring leading lady Glenn Close an Oscar in her seventh time at bat. Close is terrific, as she almost always is, but this film from Swedish director Björn Runge is in no way her match, and it would be a shame if the Academy were to honour the screen (and stage) veteran for purely sentimental reasons, having bypassed her in far-superior movies along the way. The source is a novel by the American writer Meg Wolitzer, but much of The Wife Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.Crystal Moselle’s first feature film (her extraordinary 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, about some Lower East Side siblings whose father closeted them in the family apartment for years, is a hard act to follow) homes in on eight teenage girls who bond through skateboarding. Very different Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and shrieks uttered by the protagonist Kelab (Juergen Vogel). His outbursts are something else: pained, guttural explosions of rage and terror – if there was a prize for best shouting in a film, Vogel would be a shoo-in. Kelab is based on Ötzi, the "Tyrolean iceman", whose frozen, mummified body was uncovered by a pair of German tourists in 1991: Iceman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Domnhall Gleeson needs to watch it. In Goodbye Christopher Robin he played AA Milne, the creator of Pooh and co. To achieve the correct level of period English PTSD, it was as if he’d folded himself up into a neat pile of desiccated twigs. And now he’s gone and done it again in The Little Stranger, only more so.In an adaptation of the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters he plays Faraday, a quiet Warwickshire doctor with a trim little moustache who is drawn into the chaotic lives of the Ayres family up at Hundreds Hall, the crumbling old pile where his mother used to be a servant before the First World Read more ...
Owen Richards
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management. Across its runtime, the documentary answers this in no uncertain terms: this is who she’s always been, and mainstream success is a by-product of her unflinching, challenging nature. It builds a compelling picture of one of music’s most singular stars.Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (titled after her birth name, anglicised nickname and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Animation fans have rarely had it so good, though it’s nothing short of criminal that the mean-spirited, infantile Peter Rabbit took more money than the sublime Paddington 2, and that Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner wasn’t a popular success when released earlier this year. Redress the balance, and buy this disc today. Based on the first novel in Deborah Ellis’s Afghanistan-set series, it’s a remarkable film, at times so real, so acutely observed, that you forget it’s animated at all – as with My Life as a Courgette, you’re left incredulous that this riveting assemblage of pixels and pencil Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as Read more ...
James Graham
Thank you. It’s an honour to have been asked to speak here today. Although looking at the h100 List this year, I’ve no idea why I’m presumptuously standing here; given the talent, creativity and achievements far surpassing my own within this room. But I’m also excited, and genuinely inspired, to be part of such a group.I don’t know about you, but I find working in the arts often seriously discombobulating in either being a far-too-lonely and private endeavour one minute; an overwhelming public and intensely populated one the next.Those days where the only human contact you have is with the Read more ...