Film
Adam Sweeting
Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. When in Never Here New York conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) finds a stranger’s phone, she uses it as the basis for her next art show, tracking down and interviewing the owner’s contacts, listening to his music and using his GPS history to retrace his steps. She lives in a private bubble of self-regard, and is shocked when her subject is hurt and angered by her crass exploitation of his privacy. “You’ve done a bad thing,” he tells her at the show’s launch party.Miranda comes out with fatuous nuggets of pseudobabble like “circumstances Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star player to come out as gay while continuing to play at the top of the game, is no secret. Two decades on from the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the destructive consequences are all too well known; recent fictional reminders, such as John Donnelly’s The Pass (made into an accomplished film by Ben A Williams two years ago), suggest that little has changed. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a father-son relationship lies in understanding the full nuance of its title. The word wajib, best translated from Arabic as “social duty”, is spoken only once in the film – an invitation is taken to an old lady whom the hosts know will be unable to attend, but they offer it because that is the accepted, the proper way in their society – but its concept pervades the entire film.Jacir has located her story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Harry Dean Stanton died in September last year aged 91, and will forever be remembered as the embodiment of the lean, lonely, laconic stranger, a man of few words but imbued with an enigmatic allure. This film, the directorial debut of character actor John Carroll Lynch, has been conceived as both homage to and starring vehicle for the departed Stanton, but doesn’t quite hit the spot on either count.Harry D is the eponymous Lucky, a solitary 90-something living on the edge of a sleepy, sun-baked town in the Arizona desert and trying to understand what his life has meant. Displaying a heroic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Life has sped up so, so much in the 82 years since My Man Godfrey appeared. The narrative pacing of many Hollywood films from that era seems painfully slow to modern viewers. My Man Godfrey, on the other hand, watched here in the company of a 15-year-old, has not lost a jot of its wild pacing, or indeed its zany vitality and arch commentary on economic disparity (the latter especially welcome as society increasingly gears itself towards ensuring the rich become more so while the rest of us flail).It was a big hit at the time, nominated for six Oscars, including all the acting ones (although Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fenella Fielding - “one of the finest female impersonators in the business,” joked Eric Morecambe – has died at the age of 90. Most actors of such a great vintage tend to be forgotten, but not Fielding. Last year she celebrated her big birthday with a memoir. Its alluring title Do You Mind If I Smoke? was lifted from that succulent scene in Carry On Screaming! Playing a femme fatale draped on a divan, Fielding seemed to exude sultry clouds of steam from her very pores.The memoir brought her a great deal of publicity. She did book events, she read the readers’ news on Radio 4’s PM, she was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Few things divide opinion as much as comedy, and we’ve all had the experience of sitting through a film stony-faced while all around collapse with mirth. What tickles you? Erudite Wildean wordplay, or the simple joys of watching a fat bloke fall over? The genius of Mel Brooks’ 1967 incarnation of The Producers is that it ticks so many boxes. There’s something to please (and offend) everyone. The set-up should by now be familiar: has-been Broadway producer teams up with naïve accountant to produce a show so terrible that it will close on opening night, allowing them to flee with the oversold Read more ...
Steven Eastwood
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.Hazanavicius Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A starry and mostly American cast does well by The Seagull, Chekhov's eternally moving portrait of egomania run wild and self-abasement turned tragically inward. Combining two major players from the New York theatre world in director Michael Mayer (London's Funny Girl, Broadway's Hedwig and the Angry Inch) with a Tony-winning adapter in The Humans' Stephen Karam, the film suffers only from an occasional literalmindedness that exists at odds with the multi-layered nuance of the source material. Still, Annette Bening in full flow is always worth one's attention, and a distinguished supporting Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Desiree Akhavan’s second film, following on from her rather ironically titled Appropriate Behaviour of 2014. That was a coming-out drama about a bisexual, Iranian-American woman, whose story closely reflected the director’s own – and Akhavan played its lead role, too. With The Miseducation of Cameron Post, she has widened her perspective considerably, and her new film, while surely retaining gay community admirers, will also speak, it must be hoped, to a considerably wider audience. On which note, mainstream name Chloë Grace Moretz’s presence in the title role, as well as the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
She was “the most important war correspondent of her generation”, says Sean Ryan, her editor at The Sunday Times. And her colleague Paul Conroy describes her as “a complete and utter one-off – exceptionally driven, with a real sense of purpose”. These tributes are for Marie Colvin, who was killed by President Assad’s forces on February 22 2012.Conroy was on assignment with her when she died. He was badly wounded in the attack, but escaped from Syria to write the book which forms the basis for Under the Wire. Speaking directly to camera, he tells the gripping story of their illegal entry into Read more ...