Film
Nick Hasted
“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia.Bongela splices forgotten archives of polished propaganda, raw videotaped reality and painful conversation to understand her own racial reality, and how colonial scars can be complimentary yet invisible for black and white South Africans today. White hands are shown etching borders and conjuring flags, stamps and anthems as Bantustan “homelands” Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore. It was first used to describe a crop of horror films released in 2014, including Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walk Home Alone at Night, but it has also been used to describe some of the most recognisable horror films of the decade by directors like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and Ari Aster. To some this is an innocent enough Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
India Lewis
Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands is one of those films that, perhaps embarrassingly, feels very necessary. An examination of the history of solely all female bands in Scotland since the 1960s, it is a great demonstration of how little seems to have changed, particularly when it comes to the industry’s perceived "risk" when backing these groups.The film is a chronological journey through genres in musical history, starting in 1964 with the McKinley sisters, who seemed on track for success but were passed over in favour of male pop groups. Their music is eminently Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Is it mere coincidence or already a new trend? Animated films about the unlikely friendships between robots and animals are thriving. Earlier this year, Pablo Berger's heart-warming retro tale Robot Dreams proved that fur and metal can go a long way when it comes to creating a kids' film that is in touch with the times. In The Wild Robot, things are a little more complicated: machines and feral creatures get to learn from each other the hard way.The story starts simply enough: Rozzum "Roz" Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a service robot, designed to help people, always Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was. The premise was a curse that drives you mad with violent hallucinations that eventually force you to kill yourself, passing the curse on to whoever witnesses your death. But Smile didn’t become a box-office hit because of its sensitive approach to mental health, it was because its many quiet-quiet-LOUD scares were thrillingly effective and because Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
QueerWilliam Burroughs’ eponymous novel was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, but it has finally reached the screen under the helmsmanship of Luca Guadagnino. It bombards the viewer from a variety of angles and leaves plenty of treacherous crevasses to fall into, but is bound to be remembered mostly for Daniel Craig’s central performance as William Lee, an expatriate American of invisible means living a life of self-exile in Mexico in the early 1950s.If Craig was hell-bent on burying James Bond for good, he could hardly have chosen better (007 tends to blot out the impressive variety of Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t that nourishing, even though he adds some crunchier elements along the way.The nub of both the play and two earlier film adaptations is a knotty plot featuring an innocent woman accused of a crime that paradoxically makes her fêted and successful. Ozon’s heroine is another such, a pert ingenue blonde actress, Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.Anna Kendrick directs for the first time and also stars in this gripping drama, written by Ian McDonald and based on the true- Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told.In a legendary feat of perseverance, Shackleton kept a crew of 30 men alive for almost two years in brutal conditions – and on a diet of penguins, seals, and their own sledge dogs – after his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea.“I have marvelled often at the thin line that Read more ...
graham.rickson
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.Recycling Marketa Lazarová’s lavish sets and costumes proved impossible, though both films share a vivid sense of time and place. Zdeněk Liška again provided a stark, haunting score, though large stretches of The Valley of the Bees are devoid of both music and dialogue. We first meet Petr Čepek’s Ondřej as a taciturn adolescent, incurring his Read more ...