Film
Graham Fuller
Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.It's a timely film given the race riots and hate crimes stoked by far-right agitators this summer – when would it not be timely? It gets its vital message across, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novel, about one man’s stand against the evils of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. But, for me, what is most striking about the film is the reminder it offers of the mystery of acting, and in particular its malleability; call it a gift, or a craft, but we too often underestimate the best of it, how extraordinary it can be for an actor to completely embody a character, real or fictional, so convincingly that an audience believes, Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and ending with All About My Mother (1999), that were full of life, language and the aberrant behaviour of strong female characters.In his new movie, The Room Next Door, his first full-length feature in English – adapted from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez – the two main characters are once again a pair of indomitable women facing up to a crisis, but somehow both Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Ellwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. His debut documentary’s protagonist Warren Ellis is a contrastingly loving renegade, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who became Nick Cave’s wild-maned right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist, and journeys here to the Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle.Ellis Park divides halfway between Ellis’s reluctant return to Ballarat and his subsequent sanctuary visit. Skittish time Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard (pictured above) got the warmest reception: its sold-out screenings were greeted with laughter and a standing ovation. It’s a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.Set in Mexico and originally to be filmed there, but made eventually (with virtual Mexican backdrops) in a studio near Paris, Emilia Pérez has a telenova plot, features song and dance numbers, is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
MariaHow do you solve a problem like Maria? Pablo Larrain’s film picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who have broken the highbrow barrier to become truly universal figures. It pivots around a performance from Angela Jolie which stands a chance of elevating her from a mere movie star into something approaching greatness.Larrain has invaluable support from Edward Lachman’s sumptuous cinematography, both monochrome and colour, while screenwriter Steven Knight (also the writer of Larrain’s Spencer) has been Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar.During lockdown, the French director Jacques Audiard concocted an opera with the French chanteuse Camille titled Emilia Pérez, after its main character, based on the 2018 novel Ecoute by Boris Razon. Now he’s turned it into a film musical, but one more like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg than anything MGM ever produced. There are few “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris Read more ...