Film
Graham Fuller
One of European cinema’s most dynamic storytellers, Jacques Audiard chose to follow his iconoclastic romance Rust and Bone and remorseless prison drama A Prophet with a film addressing Europe’s refugee crisis. The no less searing Dheepan won the Palme d’or at Cannes last year.The decision to depict the experiences of three Hindu Tamils newly arrived in France was prompted by the likelihood that the movie’s predominantly French audience would be relatively unfamiliar with the fallout of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009. In terms of posterity, it was a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A woman’s brain is a mystery,” explains one man to another in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. “You have to pay attention to women. Be thoughtful occasionally. Caress them. Remember they exist, they’re alive and they matter to us.” They matter to no one so much as the great Spanish film director. Almodóvar has flirted with exploring the emotional ebb and flow of homosexuality in his work, but for the most part he has pursued his veneration of the fairer sex. “Women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects,” he once explained. “They have a greater range of registers.”The proof is in the film Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Ukraine embroiled in conflict and a currency crisis the Odessa International Film Festival does not have the budget to bring in big stars. In any case, most of those pampered A-listers would have been nervous to go to what they or their advisers would have assumed to be a conflict zone. One really has to to admire the Festival’s volunteer-fuelled enthusiasm - it may be the underdog of international film fests, but it delivers an enlightening, elegantly organised and hugely enjoyable event. The Brit element was out in relative force this year. The winner of the festival’s main prize Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and divided the critics. The French and Americans loved it, while hard-nosed British critics scoffed. Adapted from a novel, it’s the story of Sentaro, who makes dorayaki (little pancake purses stuffed with sweet red bean paste) and sells them from a corner shop in a Tokyo back street. Masatoshi Nagase plays Sentaro as a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of Queen Christina Vasa of Sweden has been told in opera, novels and on stage. It was first addressed by cinema in 1933 when Greta Garbo played the title role in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. Liv Ullmann then took the part in 1974’s The Abdication.The reasons for the persistent attraction to the story are clear. Christina was six when her father King Gustav II Adolph was killed in battle in 1632. Queen at 18, she studied voraciously and wanted knowledge and literacy for all. In thrall to the ideas of Descartes, she brought him to Sweden. She did not obediently accept Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. In his adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon especially, Kubrick’s meticulously achieved “realism” (which avoids the squalour of the poor), lugubrious grandeur, Read more ...
mark.kidel
America is a country that has always thrived on dramatic battles between "good" and "evil", God and the Devil. Demonising may have Puritan roots, but it remains a particularly American obsession. The photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe, whose sexually explicit images shocked many of his compatriots, drew much of his strength from exploiting the chasm that divides the self-righteously "pure" and the darker forces of revolution. He embodied the shadow of his country more radically than any other artist of his time, and cultivated a devilish notoriety that ensured him the fame and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stretching relations till they snap is Thomas Vinterberg’s abiding theme. In his iconoclastic, Dogme 95-instigating youth, accusations of incest and gross bad manners smashed the respectable veneer of Festen’s family. In his fiercely gripping comeback The Hunt, Mads Mikkelsen was violently ostracised from his small community when falsely accused of child abuse. Now The Commune looks at the titular try for an ideal community in 1975 Copenhagen, and its fracture due to the usual human failings. But this time Vinterberg, who was himself raised in a commune, warmly applauds the attempt. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Matt Damon's Jason Bourne makes his introductory appearance, as a bare-knuckle boxer somewhere in the lawless Greek-Albanian borderlands, it speaks volumes. Bourne is severely muscled-up, but he looks older, wearier and existentially imperilled. You could say much the same for this belated franchise addition, which is bristling with technology and intensely-detailed action scenes, but struggles to find much that wasn't done better, or more purposefully, in the earlier films.Not least because the previous Bournes seem to be on permanent heavy rotation on ITV2, you're haunted by déjà vu. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The home-cinema release of Absolute Beginners is a rarity, as it’s one where watching the bonus before the main feature is a must. In Absolute Ambition, those involved with the film are brutally frank about this most hyped piece. It’s also an eloquent, fascinating potted history of the pop-cultural milieu that led to it being made in the then still-resonating aftermath of punk. Despite being set in the 1958 of its source book, Colin MacInnes’S Absolute Beginners, director Julian Temple avers that the film was more about when it was made than when it was set.That wasn’t clear on its release, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Those top notes of Marilyn Monroe’s in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Read more ...