Film
Helen Hawkins
In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. Liptrot’s screenplay, cowritten with Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt, turns her into a young woman called Rona, played by Ronan, but gives her an alternative CV as a research microbiologist by training. Actual Liptrot scraped a living cleaning oil-rig workers’ toilets at home on Orkney, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The trial of the left-wing intellectual Pierre Goldman, who was charged in April 1970 with four armed robberies, one of which led to the death of two pharmacists, was known as “The Trial of the Century” – even though the century wasn’t over yet, as one of the prosecutors quipped.It is over now, of course, but even though the events explored in Cédric Kahn’s semi-biographical courtroom drama unfolded more than half a century ago, there’s an electrifying currency to the film, which touches on a marvellous array of French discontents harking back to the Dreyfus Affair. At the same time its Read more ...
Justine Elias
Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe.After 16 years as a working artist in Brussels, Barry inherited her father’s Wexford farm and grew her flock. Today she tends 29 white Lleyn sheep, whose black-lined eyelashes make them look like hung-over nightclubgoers who fell asleep in their makeup.In Cara Holmes’s lyrical documentary, Barry – and the sheep and the Border Collie watching Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you.French director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature (her first was Revenge in 2017, a rape-revenge thriller) is a stylised commentary on the female body, Hollywood, sexism and ageism. It’s over-long and repetitive but still packs a gloriously hyper-real punch, shot by Benjamin Kracun, full of vivid colour, wide-angled lenses and movie references such as Carrie, Alien, The Elephant Man, Frankenstein, Barbie, with a Psycho shower-head Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
“Are you a serial killer?” asks a woman sitting in a pick up truck with a man she just met at a bar. The neon sign from the motel they are parked outside bathes the couple in cool, blue light. “Do you have any idea of the risks a woman like me takes every time she agrees to have a bit of fun?” As we see this very woman being chased by the same man in the next scene, we wouldn’t be wrong to assume Strange Darling is a cat-and-mouse thriller with a #MeToo slant. Instead, this twisty and bold film from JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels) will spend the next 96 minutes toying with these assumptions. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a bold move to give a UK cinema release to this fierce courtroom drama about a French left-wing intellectual who was assassinated in1979. Pierre Goldman isn’t exactly a well-known figure on this side of the Channel, but perhaps the distributors hope that after the recent box-office success of Anatomy of A Fall and Saint Omer, there’s a whetted appetite for another forensic examination of the French legal system.Certainly anyone who goes to see The Goldman Case will find much to admire in this claustrophobic but utterly absorbing film. Director Cédric Kahn has restaged the 1976 trial of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.In his 2015 docufiction Taxi Tehran, the outlawed director Jafar Panahi pretended to be a cab driver, taking inspiration from the late great Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002), in which Mania Akbari, who may have actually been the film’s true begetter, seems to be a taxi driver even if she’s not.Both movies focussed on the atomised lives of Iranians under Read more ...
Justine Elias
The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous effect in The Shining.Here, the lover on his way to a midnight rendezvous is poison-pen drama critic Jimmy Erskine, who worships the theatre but saves his secret passion for nighttime prowls for rough trade. As played by Ian McKellen, Erskine is a magnificent bastard, gifted, witty, and treading a fine line with his conservative employer. His Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic.Unfortunately, it’s precisely because those photographs have become so familiar that Lee was destined to be a frustrating film. We know what Miller looked like from the pictures taken of her by the likes of Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and David Scherman. It’s hard not to have those images in mind when watching the also familiar Kate Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since.Reawakening, Virgina Gilbert’s terrific second feature, is a gripping exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and self-deception. John, a tense-jawed man who looks bleached of colour, is an electrician whose hobby is toy trains; his wife Mary (Juliet Stevenson) is a schoolteacher, working at the same school that Clare, their only child Read more ...