Film
Saskia Baron
These are sensitive times when it comes to playing anyone on screen with a mental health condition, particularly when it’s a comedy with Kristen Wiig. But Welcome to Me pulls it off, skittering nimbly along a tightrope between offensiveness, surreal humour and mawkishness.Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a failed veterinary assistant first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her teens and now living on disability benefits, mandatory therapy and medication from her controlling therapist (Tim Robbins, pictured below right). He considers her to have borderline personality disorder (BPD) and certainly she’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Amazing, isn't it, how the good ol' comic book is inexorably swallowing the planet. With the Marvel empire running rampant through all media, DC Comics are racing to catch up with their DC Extended Universe. It debuted with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel in 2013, and continues here as Snyder returns to helm this bloated yarn of superheroes at loggerheads.However, devotees of this same Snyder will perhaps find that it's his earlier film, 2009's Watchmen, that springs to mind here, with its story of a group of jaded, retired superheroes trapped in a satirical Cold War dystopia. In this new movie, Read more ...
Holly O'Mahony
If an authority figure ordered you to inflict pain on another person, to what extent would you comply? That is the subject of Experimenter, which focuses on Stanley Milgram's controversial obedience experiment. Unable to secure a theatrical run in the UK, writer-director Michael Almereyda’s urgent biographical drama, which had its premiere at Sundance last year, is now available on DVD and for digital download. The movie’s unsettling depiction of our capacity for cruelty makes it essential viewing.Yale social psychologist Milgram devised the experiment following the 1961 trial of Adolf Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a fair bet that when Lewis Hamilton and his Formula One colleagues are driving to practice sessions they don’t have to queue for 90 minutes at a military checkpoint. This was just one illuminating vignette of the daily grind shown in Amber Fares’ interesting documentary about a group of Palestinian female car-racers, the first all-women team in the Arab world.This incident happened to team captain Maysoon, who marshals Marah, Noor, Mona and Betty, four very likeable women who love racing cars. Fares tells their stories through interviews with the women and their families, interspersed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I hope Todd Haynes isn't consumed with bitterness about the way Carol was ignored at the Oscars – mind you, a world where the dreary Spotlight can get Best Film probably isn't one he misses much – but the discerning filmgoer can be in little doubt that this is a masterpiece. A lesbian love story derived from Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt, it's as poignant and haunting an exploration of the ways of the human heart as you could hope to find, graced with central performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara which are as brilliant as they're dissimilar.As Carol Aird, a fashion- Read more ...
David Kettle
When a film’s two leads start debating George Bernard Shaw in the middle of a fight to the death, you know you’re in trouble. In fact, Shakespeare, Byron, Melville, Rimbaud and plenty more all get namechecked in William Monahan’s pretentious doppelgänger thriller. With a bit more flair and wit, and a little less sententious self-importance, Mojave could have ended up as an outrageously entertaining parody. Instead, it just feels self-obsessed and disappointingly mundane.It doesn’t help that the two leads in question are so thoroughly unsympathetic. Garrett Hedlund (pictured below) plays Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s unbelievable how hard it is to retell the greatest story ever told. And yet dramatists still feel the urge. The BBC had a big Easter binge a few years ago with the Ulster actor James Nesbitt playing a sort of Prodius Pilate. Now here’s a film financed by producers of a missionary bent. It’s called Risen and it’s essentially a sermon disguised as a sword-and-sandals epic.Still reading? Risen’s closest cinematic forebear is possibly Ben Hur in which a non-Christian is drawn into the benign orbit of an unkempt Nazarene pauper with healing powers. In this case the benighted pagan is Roman Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) feels he’s “living in a future that had already taken place”. Director Ben Wheatley, too, has made a late-arriving Seventies exploitation pic from JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. High-Rise is a highly sexy and violent look through a distorting lens at both that familiar past, and the way we live now.Like many similar Ballard tales, its dystopia is cleanly simple, with architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) living in Bourbon splendour with wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) at the top of his new, self-sufficient tower-block. In lower floors, like a concrete Titanic, malfunctions Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.More a phenomenon than an artist, she was certainly a paradox: her dedication to classical music was all-consuming, as total as her inability to perceive that she had none of the technical accomplishment required to perform Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you saw The Social Network, for which Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, you will recognise the type also on display here – a hugely driven, arrogant genius who is emotionally illiterate. In The Social Network it was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; in Steve Jobs, it’s the co-founder of Apple.Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Sorkin from Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography, the film focuses on three tumultuous periods in Jobs's life: his private crisis before the Macintosh launch in 1984, the unveiling of his ill-fated NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac launch in 1998, and seeks to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Girls just wanna have fun," or so we're told in the exuberant signature song from Cyndi Lauper making a surprise appearance midway through Anomalisa. But try telling that to the sad-eyed folk who move through Charlie Kaufman's dazzlingly sorrowful 2016 Oscar nominee, as if in a sort of hushed-voiced haze.Funny in parts but dead serious in its view of that deadening thing we call life, Anomalisa offers up so singularly eccentric a world of blankness and despair that it has a contradictory effect on the viewer, sending one back out onto the streets ready to embrace their shapes, sounds and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Home can be the most horrifying place, especially when you’re pregnant. Kate (Clemence Poesy) isn’t even sure she wants the kid that’s on the way to disrupt life with fellow arty professional Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore). That is, until a couple move in below their Islington flat, and she’s befriended by Theresa (Laura Birn), an exotically glamorous Finn evangelical about her own pregnancy, who Kate finds herself fascinated by. The sounds drifting through the floor of Theresa’s vigorous sex life with Jon (David Morrissey), the banker husband she’s happily kept by, add to Kate’s suspicion Read more ...