Film
Jasper Rees
Steven Soderbergh has always been capable of a big Hollywood moment – Magic Mike, Oceans etc. But much of his filmography consists of curious sideways glances. He’s particularly drawn to the shifting distribution of power between the genders. From sex, lies and videotape to Haywire, by way of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, he has rifled through the genres to find fresh and intriguing stories about men and women. It comes up again in Unsane, a sort of horror comedy satire that makes great use of Claire Foy’s vertical rise to bankability. It also, for the record, features a fun cameo from Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Bulgarian co-directing duo of Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov proved their skill with the scalpel in slicing through the unforgiving world depicted in their first film, The Lesson, from 2014. Their follow-up in a loosely planned trilogy, Glory continues that dissection of Bulgarian society, one now depicted on a broader canvas and with an element of pitch-black comedy that is new.It’s a darkly entertaining watch, which involves direct comparison between two very different worlds – one that appears virtually unaffected by the social changes that followed the end of communism, the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mary Magdalene’s story hasn’t suddenly become the second greatest ever told, despite its radical expansion here. Garth Davis’s follow-up to Lion is, though, a profoundly thoughtful and convincing telling of the Christian main event. This Mary (Rooney Mara) is an interventionist, outsider witness to Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix), seeing his ministry from fresh, oblique angles. Stumbling almost into the path of a bloody Christ collapsing under his cross’s weight has documentary shock, while his words sound fresh-minted. The millennia-old sexism which has calcified major religions is meanwhile plucked Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Its cast includes Danish heart-throb Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple). The setting is Stockholm’s fashionable art Read more ...
mark.kidel
Henri-Georges Clouzot is one of the giants of French cinema history, such a versatile master of entertainment that his qualities as an auteur and art-house director are sometimes forgotten. This new collection of his restored films includes some of his very best work: Le corbeau (1943), a tale of poison pen letters in wartime France; Quai des Orfèvres (1947), the complex and twisted story of a pianist and composer’s jealousy – stirred up by his neurotic singer wife; and the only colour film he made, La prisonnière (1968) which plunges with almost perverse relish into the eroticism that was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mild controversy hovers over the new film by Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director. Garland’s 2015 directing debut, Ex Machina, was a slow-burning hit which found favour with critics and film festival juries. This follow-up, then, should have been Garland’s giant bound into the big (or at least bigger) time, but instead, after a disappointing theatrical debut in the States, it’s now bypassing cinemas and streaming on Netflix for the rest of the world.However, dark rumours of a science fiction masterpiece cruelly abused by a timorous Paramount Studios, who apparently Read more ...
Owen Richards
Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric). Its original French title Three Memories from My Youth is more interesting and accurate than the bland UK release title, which sounds more like a silver screener starring a selection of British dames.Paul Dédalus is heading back to Paris after many nomadic years as an anthropologist across central Asia. Feeling nostalgic, he first Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
David Bailey taught Nureyev to dance at the Ad Lib club in London in the Sixties. “He was very stiff. He could do all that Swan Lake stuff but he couldn’t do the twist,” remembers Bailey in one of My Generation’s voiceover interviews, some vintage, some in conversation today.Directed by David Batty and presented by Michael Caine – the film was his friend and producer Simon Fuller’s idea, inspired by Caine’s anecdotes – with a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it features great archival footage of those glory days when London swung and everyone smoked. Who can resist Twiggy giggling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons. Set in Coney Island in the 1950s, Wonder Wheel has the jaded flavour you get off an old-timer playing oldies on a thinner, reedier instrument.Its nearest stablemate in Allen’s filmography is Blue Jasmine. That also attracted an actress of stature in Cate Blanchett. More pertinently, it channelled the spirit of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.Even its running time is designed to provoke. At a mere 85 minutes, it rejects the creeping bloat which has become endemic in Hollywood, and the shock of its abrupt ending leaves you feeling as if you’ve just staggered out of some terrible accident, and you’re trying to put Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a terrific drive to Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, a cinematic powerhouse of both technique and ideas. The maverick Hungarian director’s film, which premiered in last year’s Cannes competition, may occasionally bewilder – such is the spectrum of subjects upon which it touches – but rarely fails to impress.The energy of its opening takes us right into the frantic disorder of Europe’s refugee crisis, as an attempted border crossing – a rush from a crowded lorry onto boats – is intercepted by troops. A single figure flees, only to be felled by gunfire, before rising into the sky in a Read more ...