Film
graham.rickson
The first words we hear in The Piano are the thoughts of Holly Hunter’s Ada, and they set up the film’s premise perfectly: “I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why… not even me. My father says it is a dark talent …Today he married me to a man I have not yet met.” Ada and her young daughter (a deservedly award-winning turn from a young Anna Paquin) pitch up on a bleak New Zealand beach. With them is Ada’s beloved Broadwood piano, transported from Scotland and left abandoned on the sand when her colonist husband claims he has no room for it in his house. Ada’s keyboard is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Father Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) calls himself one of God’s lonely men. The term given to Paul Schrader’s anti-heroes since Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is usefully explained by the priest: his loneliness is a divine attribute letting him sympathise with fellow sufferers. Take one look at Hawke’s face, though, which seems sucked into hollow-cheeked, unnatural nobility, and it’s clear few need help more than him.First Reformed’s opening shot dollies towards a looming clapboard church which predates the United States. The state of the nation and planet still seeps into what has become a tourist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a simply terrific performance from Laia Artigas as Simón’s six-year-old heroine Frida, the intonations of her face conveying variations of emotion that are powerful beyond anything words could achieve.Following in the tradition of cinema about childhood, we experience events as much through Frida’s eyes as we do from any knowing, adult perspective. Read more ...
graham.rickson
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-maligned Essex new town of Basildon look uncommonly attractive. The spiritual home of Essex man, this solidly Conservative town isn’t what you’d expect.Basildon was born in the late 1940s, planned to accommodate the thousands of East Enders living in terraced slums. As one veteran resident puts it, “I just wanted a bathroom and a toilet.” It was (and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite stretchiness… Time has been kind to Elastigirl, the superhero mom voiced by Holly Hunter and dreamed up by Brad Bird. Fourteen years have passed since The Incredibles seduced adult critics and children alike, but it might as well be yesterday for Elastigirl. She’s as bodacious as ever, nary a wrinkle on her animated face nor a sag to her ample posterior. And Elastigirl is still eager to fully extend herself and catch the bad guys.If only superheroes weren’t outlawed for causing chaos ("Politicians don’t understand people who do good just Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Woodfall was the independent film production company responsible more than any other for launching and realising the British New Wave of the early 1960s. The outfit was formed in 1958 by theatre and film director Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne, and American producer Harry Saltzman to make the film version of Osborne’s Royal Court succès de scandale Look Back in Anger. Directed by Richardson in 1959, the movie – with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure – successfully opened up the play but trimmed its Suez Crisis polemic.Woodfall followed up in the next five years with Read more ...
Owen Richards
On the surface, Pin Cushion is a whimsical British indie, packed with imagination and charm. But debuting director Deborah Haywood builds this on a foundation of bullying and prejudice, creating a surprisingly bleak yet effective film.Teenager Iona and her mother Lyn (Lily Newmark and Joanna Scanlan, main picture) are a pair of social outcasts, recently moved to Swadlincote in Derbyshire. They’re constantly festooned in bright woolly layers and surrounded by ornamental tat and misplaced furniture (including a toilet at the head of their shared double bed). Iona boasts about her new school Read more ...
David Kettle
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single Brit would invest (though he has German and Irish backers) – potential supporters were apparently too nervous of their names getting out.Have the values of Remain already become so ignored and so – well, unacceptable? Possibly. Which, of course, makes it all the more crucial that Wilkinson has provided Remainers with this platform to present their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Swimming with Men is a British comedy which must have looked like a dead cert when it was pitched. “A bunch of middle-aged male losers do synchronised swimming. They have a bossy female coach who persuades them to go to the world championships. How funny (and moving) is that? The tears will flow. The jokes will write themselves!” Unfortunately the jokes did not write themselves, and no one else got round to writing them either.The rot sets in early when Eric (Rob Brydon), a salaryman who does the numbers for a big City firm, walks out on his marriage to Heather (Jane Horrocks), whom he Read more ...
Owen Richards
The world was captivated by the Arab Spring – thousands of citizens rising up in unity against longstanding dictatorships, filling squares and refusing to bow. But for many of us, it was a world away; the crowds were a single organism, thinking and acting as one. What The Nile Hilton Incident does incredibly well is create the feeling of being an individual on those streets: placing you in that simmering cauldron, a city on the edge.On paper, The Nile Hilton Incident is a classic noir: police commander Noredin Mostafa (Fares Fares, main picture) is placed on the murder of Lalena, a famous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a year ago that Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Why Can’t I Be Me was released. Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary about the rise and hideous demise of one of pop’s greatest stars was made with the blessing of her family, but doesn’t shed significantly more light than the Broomfield version. In fact a couple of Broomfield’s interviewees who don’t appear here were more illuminating than some who do.It’s true that this time Whitney’s mother Cissy is interviewed, though she talks about the young Whitney (or Nippy, as she was always known within the family) with a great future ahead of her Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wes Anderson’s fourth feature followed on from The Royal Tenenbaums, still a near-perfect blend of whimsy, pathos and poetry. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is almost as ungainly as its title, the mismatched crew of Bill Murray’s ship acting as a surrogate dysfunctional family. Murray’s oceanographer Zissou is an affectionate parody of Jacques Cousteau: accused by his detractors of being washed up, he resolves to turn matters around: “We haven’t made a hit documentary in nine years. I’m going to set sail to find the shark that ate my friend.”Enter a perfectly cast Owen Wilson as a Read more ...