Film
Tom Birchenough
Finnish director Dome Karukoski has made a sympathetic and quietly stylish biopic of Touko Laaksonen, the artist who did as much as anyone to define 20th century male gay visual culture. There’s a degree of irony in the fact that we know him by his national pseudonym – he started signing his work “Tom” for anonymity, while “of Finland” was thought up by an American publisher – given that post-war Helsinki is depicted here as about as repressive an environment for a young man exploring his sexuality as could be imagined. Asked at one point whether he has published his work in his homeland Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets. This film has some great archival footage that brings those days to life, though it could have done with fewer talking heads and more detailed interpretation.Vanity Fair writer and director Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” plays as Charlize Theron’s Lorraine Broughton makes her entrance. She’s the last Cold War super-spy, a female Bond sent to Berlin as the Wall crumbles. “Killer Queen”, prominent on early trailers, would have done just as well. Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is the last time an action star made such a startling bow.We meet Broughton before her post-Berlin debrief from suspicious spooks including her harassed MI6 boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA counterpart Kurzfeld (John Goodman). As she immerses her bruised body in an ice-bath which she scoops to put Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L’albero deli zoccoli) is a glorious fresco that reveals, over the course of an unhurried three hours and with a pronounced documentary element that virtually eschews narrative development, 19th century Lombardy life in all its hardship and paradoxical beauty. It’s a world defined by labour on the land and Catholicism, in which the details and rituals of existence appear unchanged over centuries. Yet its opening scene, in which a priest convinces a peasant couple that their young son ( Read more ...
Thomas Barrie
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s directorial debut, which was produced by Ben Wheatley.Genre nods, mental illness, the underlying suggestion of magic and an unreliable protagonist set the tone of the film, which follows the life of a detective who goes into therapy to try to uncover the secret of a seemingly impossible double murder, before revelations begin to suggest his life may Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The little-known Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is the Maudie of the title of Aisling Walsh's grim-faced biopic, which feels frustratingly incomplete where it really counts. Sally Hawkins's committed occupancy of this sweet-faced if largely woebegone soul compels attention, to be sure, but can't forestall the somewhat colour-by-numbers approach of the director Aisling Walsh: a movie given over to art all but demands more art of its own. I confess to never having heard of Lewis, though it's certainly interesting to note that one of her purchasers way back when was Richard Nixon, of all Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets starts promisingly: there’s Bowie’s Space Oddity on the soundtrack (a bit clichéd but evocative) and a sly montage of personnel handovers at an international space station over the decades. Astronauts from different earthly nations are superseded by increasingly awkward and funny encounters between human astronauts and phantasmagorical creatures arriving for their tour of duty – which alien protuberance will include an approximate hand to shake? And just what is that slime?Unfortunately the witty opening is bulldozed all too rapidly by the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core. This sensibility is greatly helped by its star Tom Meeten, who as police detective Chris is haggard and run-down, ready to flinch at the world. Called in by his friend Jim (Dan Renton Skinner, pictured below) to investigate a double-murder in which the victims kept walking despite being shot in the head, he tracks a suspect, Coulson (Rufus Jones), by going undercover as a clinically depressed patient of Coulson’s psychotherapist, Helen (Niamh Cusack). But reality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The sobriquet “the greatest living Englishman” has been applied to such diverse individuals as Keith Richards, Winston Churchill and Alan Bennett, but the bookies would surely offer reasonable odds on Sir Frank Williams. Having founded his current motor racing team in 1977, Williams has provided rapid transit for an array of world champions, Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill among them. Since March 1986, when he suffered a catastrophic road accident in France, Williams has been a tetraplegic confined to a wheelchair, yet this only seems to have made him more obsessively committed to his team.But Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hope Dickson Leach’s debut dissects lives in a wintry English landscape. The catastrophic 2014 floods in the Somerset Levels are the background to the return of Clover (Game of Thrones’ Ellie Kendrick) to a farmyard home which simmers with unspoken secrets. The death of her brother, soon revealed to be a mysterious shotgun suicide, and the oppressive repression of dad Aubrey (David Troughton) are the barriers which need breaching before anyone can start to get healed.The bruised, low West Country sky looks dirty grey, staining the ground below. Country life, too often marginalised in British Read more ...