Film
Jasper Rees
Is meat murder? Will people eat anything if it’s cheap? Is the taste of bacon really what stops us half the western world turning vegetarian? Okja is a commercial stretch, a partly subtitled children’s fable from South Korea which unstintingly confronts all of these deep moral questions. But it does so in the most – if you will – palatable manner. After the briefest release in the cinema, it makes the short on-trend transition to a streaming service, and it’s on Netflix that it should be consumed by anyone and everyone with a strong enough stomach to enjoy an enchanting adventure with a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944. The resulting film calmly eviscerated the legend that the French had resisted the Nazi regime and presents a far more complex history of collaboration, compromise and collusion.Initially conceived for French television, the documentary was withheld from broadcast in France in 1969 and caused a storm when it opened Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle Huppert isn’t just here for the nasty things in life. Her rape non-victim in Elle was one of the most iconoclastic performances even she’s given, enigmatic yet emotionally rich, rooted and moving. She won’t get nearly as much attention for her role here as Liliane, a singer who came second to Abba at Eurovision, who’s lured out of an anonymous retirement by a besotted, 21-year-old boxer who becomes her lover and manager. Souvenir is an unashamedly breezy romcom, full of gauzy romance, wish-fulfilment, a great faux-Eurovision soundtrack by Pink Martini, and a May-December romance that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a movie as staggeringly awful as The Book of Henry. If it was just a touch more shrill it could have qualified as a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic, but unfortunately it teeters this side of tasteful in order to keep its 12 rating. How any studio executive ever read Gregg Hurwitz’s script and thought this was a viable scenario is truly baffling. What terrible atonement for sins in a past life led Naomi Watts to take the lead is another mystery, as is the question of how director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) is going to live this debacle down and go on Read more ...
graham.rickson
F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London. Born in Islington in 1880, he joined the Quekett Microscopical Club as a teenager, all the better to pursue a healthy interest in “those members of the animal kingdom which have been for one reason or another neglected.” Initially, Smith used his microscope to create exquisite glass slides, moving into film making at the behest of Charles Urban, the influential producer of 1903’s still terrifying Cheese Mites short.Several of Smith’s early films feature on this BFI Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Do the makers of the essentially unnecessary Hampstead have a secret vendetta against north London and its citizenry? The thought occurred to me midway through Joel Hopkins's wannabe romcom, which places the ever-charming Diane Keaton smack dab in the sylvan byways of NW3, only to surround her with a ceaselessly toxic array of locals that no amount of lunches at Villa Bianca could ever put right.Sure, the Heath is great (I've lived on a street adjacent to it for years), and one is indeed likely to run into Simon Callow now and again, as happens here. But even the briefest of time in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.Despite the spiffy packaging – including a limited-run configuration with a 60-page booklet, a poster and postcards – and fresh extras – including a new interview with director Dario Argento, a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s quite an appealing mini-genre that concerns genius, usually involving mathematics and an outsider who struggles to cope for reasons that include social adaptation (Good Will Hunting), sexuality (The Imitation Game) and mental health (A Beautiful Mind). The clever trick of Gifted is that the genius in question is too young to have any idea of the problems she may face.The result is a family drama that in its broad strokes is like so many family dramas, as an orphan is fought over by relatives with very different ideas of what’s best for her. The added spice is that a girl as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He may often be voted Greatest Briton in the History of Everything, but are we approaching peak Winston? Scroll down Churchill’s IMDb entry and you’ll find that he’s been played by every Tom, Dick and Harry in all manner of cockamamie entertainments. The key pillars of his filmography are (apart from Young Winston) as follows: The Gathering Storm (Albert Finley) and Into the Storm (Brendan Gleeson), both scripted by Hugh Whitemore; The King’s Speech (Timothy Spall); The Crown (John Lithgow). Then on stage there’s been The Audience (various actors) and Three Days in May (Warren Read more ...
graham.rickson
Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. And, viewed 30 years after its cinematic release, what’s alarming is how little has changed since the late 1980s (the original tagline was "Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down"). Andrea Dunbar’s screenplay, based on two plays she’d written as a teenager living on Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, is a rambling, discursive affair, centring on the priapic Bob Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Destination Unknown is a passion project 13 years in production, a documentary featuring moving interviews with a dozen Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. Elderly men and women describe what happened to them and their families during the war. We see them returning to the slave labour and death camps, driving through the countryside and contemplating their former home towns and villages where they were rounded up for deportation.Their interviews are intercut with family photographs, ciné film and archive footage. Unlike a history programme made for television, there is no voiceover, no maps Read more ...