Film
Matt Wolf
Maggie Smith is in her element as Miss S in the film version of Alan Bennett's 1999 play The Lady in the Van, her partnership with the playwright-actor one of the defining components of the storied career of the octogenarian dame, whose renown has leapt the decades due in no small part to the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey franchises. And if this latest exercise in bravura doesn't quite deliver the emotional sucker punch of her solo turn in Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils, which Smith performed on screen and stage, the chance to see a genuine acting legend give her all to the begrimed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A Derby County footballer said of his boss Brian Clough in the late 1960s: “He’s a swine, but you’d give him your last half-dollar". Clough’s ability to inspire a do-or-die mentality – and undying loyalty – in the Nottingham Forest players he forged into Europe’s dominant club side comes across forcefully through their comments in I Believe in Miracles, which arrives on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital next week with a 31-minute making-of featurette.There’s nothing of the “swine” in Jonny Owen’s upbeat documentary: a celebration of Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor’s guiding of Forest to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of years ago there was a television documentary about Steve Jobs which wafted much smoke up the sainted iHole. A variety of famous fanboys wept over the curve on the iPhone 3 and simpered at the kleptocratic takeover of the music industry. Never mind that Jobs was reportedly short of redeeming features. A documentary has no obligation to supply drama. A feature film is another story. The makers of Steve Jobs have their work cut out finding something plausibly nice to say about a driven egomaniac who tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s changing the planet.Michael Fassbender is always Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Sean Baker is an adept at exploring different Los Angeles worlds that we don’t often see portrayed in standard Hollywood fare. His much-acclaimed Starlet, from 2012, took us into the city’s porn industry (in an entirely non-judgmental way), ticking most of the boxes usually associated with “independent” cinema.Tangerine goes further out on a limb, and proves an energy-driven piece that seems to breathe the life of the seedy streets of the less salubrious end of Santa Monica Boulevard around which it’s set. Baker developed his story of two transgender prostitutes by working Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s nothing like the Palio, the race which twice each summer plunges the city of Siena into a state of collective derangement. If you’ve been you’ll know. If you haven’t, watch Palio for the closest approximation to actual attendance that any filmmaker has yet achieved. And there have been many attempts.The horse race, consisting of three circuits of the city’s apron-shaped Piazza del Campo, contains multitudes. Its roots in medieval history go so deep they’re virtually unfathomable, while the loyalty of each citizen to their district – ingested with la latte della mamma – must be Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Death of a Gentleman begins as a hymn to Test cricket, and becomes an elegy, as its makers cross the globe in a deceptively haphazard-looking pursuit of the men who run the game. Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins are two journalists in search of a story. That the plot is not a murder mystery (who killed cricket?) but a jellyfish – Who’s running cricket? What do they want? Is anyone not in the pocket of an Indian concrete company? – becomes the story itself.Tightly cut from around 50 talking heads, it’s a film that shouldn’t work. There is no silver bullet. Cricket-lovers have watched the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Saoirse Ronan, emerging decorously into womanliness in Brooklyn, deserves a stack of awards nominations for her portrayal of a brave young woman torn between her old life in Ireland and her new existence in 1952 New York's most vibrant borough. Restraining her character’s flickers of doubt, culpability, satisfaction, and pleasure, Ronan shows how the maturation of Eilis Lacey – from seasick voyager and homesick immigrant to serene resident – is attributable to her hard-won stoicism and quiet determination.Ronan’s performance is not enough to make John Crowley’s movie great. Short on conflict Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A huge lizard in sunglasses” was Robin Askwith’s impression of Pier Paolo Pasolini on first meeting the Italian director. The actor’s entertaining, often funny and affectionate recollections of Pasolini are heard during a lengthy interview which is one of the extras on the home cinema release of Abel Ferrara’s homage to the director of Accattone, Theorem, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Canterbury Tales, which featured Askwith. By bringing a wider context, the interview contrasts with Pasolini which, instead of dramatising Pasolini’s career, focuses on the events in the hours Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
However it is looked at, Sleepwalker is one of British cinema’s strangest films. What initially seems to be a Mike Leigh-style, Abigail’s Party-ish hyper-real take on middle class mores quickly becomes an intense journey into dystopian horror which nods to both Italian gialli and films which deconstruct the nuts and bolts of British social attitudes. If late-period Mario Bava and Lindsay Anderson had collaborated to direct an episode of The Good Life, this might have been the result.Sleepwalker begins simply enough. Angela and Richard Paradise (Joanna David and Nicholas Grace) are urban, Read more ...
David Kettle
Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.A couple of the opening weekend’s events, however, felt far more straightforward in their melding of sound and vision. In the appropriate surroundings of Glasgow’s ultra-modern Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Taxi Tehran is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since the 2010 prohibition that, among other restrictions, forbade him from working in cinema for 20 years. While its very existence may count as an achievement in itself, much more importantly it’s also a lovingly cheeky riposte to those who have restricted his freedom of thought (and movement), as well as a reflection on narrative and how it is created.First there was This Is Not a Film from 2011, in which the director’s house arrest was reflected in the enclosed internal space of his home-filming. There was at least a change of Read more ...
graham.rickson
This is a reissue, but an important one, especially considering that the film industry’s gender inequalities are as entrenched as ever. Kay Mander’s cinematic career began in the mid 1930s when she became a publicist for Alexander Korda. She joined the Shell Film Unit in 1940 as a production assistant, directing her first documentary in 1941. It’s included here: How to File is a still watchable seven-minute training film aimed at metalwork apprentices. Mander’s unfussy, fluent style makes it a pleasure to watch. We get three longer shorts aimed at fire service and civil defence workers. Each Read more ...