Film
theartsdesk
It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight. This was a sweet moment for the considerable choir behind the backlash against Damien Chazelle's film. There's room for both, and plenty more, in theartsdesk film writers' picks of their favourite films. We also nominate a few stinkers because bad films deserve to be called out, too. Feel free to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After her brittle and unloveable turn in John Madden’s Washington-lobbyist drama Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain gets the chance to do it again, properly. This is thanks to Aaron Sorkin, whose directing debut Molly’s Game is. More to the point, his screenwriting is back at full blast, so while the verbiage is typically plentiful, it’s also barbed, speedy and pointed enough to cause nosebleeds and razor-cuts.Sorkin has adapted the true-life confessions of the real Molly Bloom and her wild ride running high-stakes underground poker games (“From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Read more ...
mark.kidel
A new box-set to relish, six French cinema classics by a cult director, along with a wealth of fascinating extras on a seventh DVD. The French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville belongs to a class of his own: a precursor of the New Wave, an influence on Godard, Louis Malle and others, and a successor to French film noir directors such as Pierre Chenal and Edmond T Gréville.He is most celebrated for stylish thrillers in which archetypal gangsters and lawmen are pitted against each other in a complex duel that unfolds with the tragic predictability of classical Greek drama. These films are often Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.Writer-director Mike Hodges' intermittently brilliant career has taken several head-scratching turns (see also Flash Gordon). It’s to Michael Caine’s vanity-free credit that, having had the nerve to be unsympathetic hard man Jack Carter, he happily followed Hodges’ muse to become Pulp’s cynical hack writer Mickey King in the director's 1972 film.Righteous anger sours a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The real-life PT Barnum was a mixture of impresario, hustler and exploiter, and Elvis Presley’s huckstering manager Colonel Tom Parker would surely have viewed him approvingly. However, he also was also a temperance campaigner and a reforming politician who battled against slavery and supported health and educational projects.A pity, then, that the Barnum who emerges – or perhaps fails to emerge – from Michael Gracey’s lavish musical production shows us few of these complex character traits. Played with frantic energy and dentifrice-exhibiting bonhomie by Hugh Jackman, this Barnum is a feel- Read more ...
Owen Richards
As we reach December, the year of Stephen King comes to a close with this 4K Blu-ray restoration of his very first film adaptation: Carrie. It was the first major success for Brian De Palma, Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, but how does the original high school horror hold up in the 21st century?Carrie is a strange beast – half satiric high school comedy, half intense psycho-horror. It shouldn’t work; how can film jump from domestic abuse to Benny Hill-style tuxedo shopping? But under the visionary eye of De Palma, both halves form a coherent and fulfilling whole.What dates the film most is Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s impossible to view The Last Jedi independently from its predecessors. It’s the second instalment of the third trilogy of cinema’s greatest space opera. And it’s very much a product of what came before, but not in the way you might expect.After the ambitious but deeply flawed prequels, The Force Awakens traded originality for nostalgia; a plot driven by coincidence and luck, all to serve reassured thrills. With the franchise safely re-established, Disney has now turned to indie auteur Rian Johnson (director of Looper and Brick) to shake things up.Unusually for a Star Wars film, we pick Read more ...
Owen Richards
In the most unlikely of places, there is one of the world’s most prolific directors. He has produced over 110 films, he’s mobbed wherever he goes, and he inspired people through the darkest of civil wars; yet outside of Afghanistan, no-one knows the name of Salim Shaheen, the self-proclaimed "Prince of Nothingwood".This documentary, directed by French radio journalist Sonia Kronlund, revels in the surreal nature of the world’s poorest film industry. Salim Shaheen is a whirlwind of bravado – a former army general turned auteur, leading a motley crew of ex-soldiers and sons across Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There are many obvious Hollywood responses to someone losing their legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. Director David Gordon Green waits his whole film to make one. His subject Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal) possessed too little bullshit, and too much muddled angst, and had too much to drink to behave the way a crassly patriotic public which included his mum expected. He refused to be “Boston strong”. So does Stronger.The bombing itself is a matter of happenstance, as rangy warehouse worker Jeff makes a barroom promise to his on/currently off girlfriend Erin (Tatiana Maslany) to cheer her at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Like a bizarro-world echo of Lenny Abrahamson’s Academy-titillating Room, Dave McCary’s endearing indie feature takes a potentially hideous tale of abduction and control and transforms it using the amazing healing powers of fantasy and creativity. James Pope, a fully-fledged bespectacled geek, has been living a strange life of outer-space style confinement in a desert bunker in the midst – or so he’s been led to believe – of an arid wilderness in which the air is too toxic to breathe. His sole entertainment is a crude TV animation series about the intergalactic hero, Brigsby Bear, which is Read more ...