Film
Saskia Baron
Oh dear, writing this review is a bit like being mean to a small cuddly animal. Dough has such very good intentions – characters separated by race, religion and age can find common ground in a bakery – it’s a shame that it doesn’t rise into a tasty loaf but instead remains just a bit wholemeal and stolid. The excellent Jonathan Pryce plays Nat Dayan, an orthodox Jewish widower whose sole reason to get up every morning at four is to work in his beloved shop. He inherited it from his father and still bakes traditional bagels, pastries and challah bread. But the neighbourhood’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison. It relocates the Agatha Christie-style country house mystery to a Breton chateau, where a complicated inheritance causes the corrupt de Kerloguen family to revert to murderous type. Its flightiness is tethered by Franju’s elegance and wit, and his mostly young cast’s charm.This could easily be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After dipping a toe in the new-look DC Comics universe to brighten the otherwise leaden Batman v Superman, now Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets a chance to shine in her own Hollywood movie. Gadot makes a pretty fine job of it too, bringing a bit of soul and empathy to the proceedings, but sometimes it’s more despite than because of the production surrounding her.Even in this rationality-defying context, WW’s origin story is one of the more implausible. She was raised by the Amazon women on the island of Themyscira by her mother, Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen, pictured below), with plenty of help in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes. The relationship between Betty (Naomi Watts), a perkily indomitable blonde actress from Deep River, Ontario, statuesque brunette amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring) and their seedier inversions of those characters in the final reel becomes almost mundane, when viewed through Jousse’s prism. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A man is caught up in a storm at sea; giant waves like Hokusai crests throw him onto a deserted tropical island. Over the next 80 minutes, his struggle to survive occupies the screen. Curious crabs provide a little company, but not enough to stop him trying to make a raft only to have his attempts at escape thwarted. While he is eventually blessed with some human companionship, there is no dialogue throughout the film, just music and sound effects.The Red Turtle features many beautiful sequences set in bamboo forests and thrilling underwater scenes, but it's a slow watch and at a couple Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It takes real skill to make a film about a desperate Syrian refugee and a dour middle-aged Finn reinventing himself and turn it into the warmest, most life-enhancing film I’ve seen this year. But Aki Kaurismäki has form, he’s been making movies which defy genres – are they absurdist or social realist, tragic or comic? – for 30 years now. His films do well at festivals – The Other Side of Hope won Berlinale's Silver Bear for best director this year – and regularly find their way onto the indie circuit but they never make it in the multiplex: you’ll need to be quick to catch this one on a big Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are great sportsmen, and on top of those there’s a handful of phenomena. Sachin Tendulkar is one of the latter, a cricketer of seemingly limitless gifts who’s ranked among such deities as Viv Richards and Brian Lara. Or even Don Bradman, who pops up in an archive clip in this weighty biopic saying that this bloke Tendulkar bats like he used to.Cricket followers everywhere regard Tendulkar as somewhat miraculous, but in India, he has ascended to an astral plane of adulation. He retired from the game in 2013, having amassed the kind of stats that it will probably be impossible for anybody Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked. This immaculate BFI restoration of two films by the Filipino master Lino Brocka (1939-1991) is a case in point: Isiang and Manila in the Claws of Light are from the mid-Seventies, when his native land was under Ferdinand Marcos-imposed martial law. The key player in both is the city of Manila itself, in particular its slums where life is hard, and human life cheap.With Isiang, Brocka may have been the first director from the Philippines to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We’ve recently seen how Formula One heroes Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda and James Hunt can become box office gold, in the form of Senna and Rush. Roger Donaldson’s profile of New Zealand race ace Bruce McLaren is more for enthusiasts than a wider public, but for anyone interested in the sport it’s an illuminating portrait of a gifted F1 pioneer who has lapsed somewhat into obscurity since his death in 1970, aged 32.McLaren’s name still adorns the Woking-based team that has produced champions like Senna, Mika Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton, but today’s technocratic monolith in its Star Trek Read more ...
james.woodall
This is the most frustrating film. It’s probably no fault of the makers, but it’s rare to have to assess a documentary for what it doesn’t have. Over nearly two hours of celebrating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Beatles period – late 1966 to their record label Apple taking off in 1968 – there is not a note of the group’s music.Well, alright, in the opening animated credits you detect a phrasal shimmer of George Harrison’s sitar-driven “Within You Without You”, but that’s it. The score, by Andre Barreau and Evan Jolly, is a confection of atmospherics and rhythms that could be the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An Australian who emigrated to New Zealand in 1965, Roger Donaldson cut his teeth in documentaries and TV before launching into a career in feature films. His first feature, Sleeping Dogs (1976), on the unlikely theme of a New Zealand plunged into totalitarianism, immediately attracted attention, and after he made Smash Palace (1982) Hollywood came calling. Donaldson embarked on a string of high-profile projects which included The Bounty (with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins), No Way Out (an espionage drama starring Kevin Costner), The Getaway (with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger), the sci-fi Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Initially, Madame de… feels as if it might wear out its welcome. What seems a wearisome exposition on how privileged people with too much time on their hands fill their hours with vacuity gradually turns into an incisive discourse on the power of the emotions behind the facades fashioned for polite society. Towards the end, it’s clear that even the most seemingly shallow of people can be swayed by unexpected passions. And at the end: blam, an astonishingly powerful pay-off.Reviewing Madame de… in 1954, when it was released in the UK as The Earrings of Madame de…, Lindsay Anderson (whose Read more ...