Film
Harry Thorfinn-George
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. Red Rooms' portrayal of an aspect of everyday life that too often feels stilted on the big screen is one of the many things this Quebecois thriller gets right. It Read more ...
James Saynor
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.And this absurdly delayed sequel from Burton shows how well the director’s funny bones still click together, as do those of the actors Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, back in harness here – their careers, like Burton’s, revivified in recent years after mid-career dips.Lydia Deetz, Ryder’s ghost-addled Read more ...
graham.rickson
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the BFI website as a prelude to watching this restored print of Floating Clouds. Scanlon describes him as "cinema’s greatest pessimist", something that’s hard to disagree with on the basis of this work alone.Floating Clouds, released in 1955, is a dark love story set in the ruins of post-war Tokyo. Hideko Takamine’s Yukiko returns from working in an Read more ...
Justine Elias
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man.The husband, brainy Richard (Matt Smith), teaches archaeology at a nearby university; the wife, shy, ethereal Juliette (Morfydd Clark, pictured below), manages the farm. Ttheir son, little asthmatic Owen (Arthur Shaw), is just plain weird, claiming that a spirit, "Jack Grey", whistles to him at night. Richard, a man of science, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic uses bomb-ravaged Vienna as an index of the aftermath of World War Two. It’s a city divided between the Allies and the Russians, stranded in a murky limbo between the old pre-war Europe and the divided continent that’s painfully starting to take shape. It’s a city of secrets, lies and shadows – and very haunting Expressionist-style shadows they are Read more ...
James Saynor
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past.Filmmakers usually try to frame someone back then as a modern protagonist with a modern agenda, even though few of those old-timers can be photoshopped into that. So here comes Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, presented as something of a pre-potato feminist icon in Firebrand, a movie from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Though among the most successful film comedians of the early sound era, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s cinematic partnership had actually started in the early 1920s. It’s easy to overlook their silent short films, 15 of which are collected here.The oldest, 1921’s Lucky Dog, is an entertaining curio, a starring vehicle for Laurel’s Keatonesque naif with Ollie in a subordinate role as a hapless thug. Stan’s athleticism is impressive, whether he’s being struck by a streetcar or sneaking into a dog show on all fours, and there’s a winning turn from the titular canine. Both actors signed contracts Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Paradise Is Burning is one of those films that appears to be designed to convince the outside world that Sweden isn’t all IKEA interiors and ABBA sing-alongs. There are blissful long summer days spent in pine forests and plenty of lithe-limbed girls, but the focus here is on a social underclass that Ingmar Bergman rarely filmed.Set in a suburban town near Gothenberg, the movie is the story of three sisters with an absentee mother. Laura (Bianca Delbravo), the oldest at 16, knows that the local authorities will take 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and six-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) into Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Every actor has their own take on what acting means to them, which will include the chance to occupy personalities more interesting than their own, or to shed their inhibitions, or simply the pleasure of ‘play’. A character in Sing Sing, an inmate who has joined the high security prison’s acting group, puts it more profoundly: “We’re here to become human again,” he cries, “to put on nice clothes and dance around and enjoy the things that [are] not in our reality.” This stirringly atypical addition to the prison genre is largely about the power of art to change lives, in this Read more ...
James Saynor
We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.But the dusty badlands where the Eastwoodian protagonist touches down in Black Dog is in the north-west of China in 2008, and this is a Chinese film from director Guan Hu, maker of patriotic action movies like The Eight Hundred (2020). So how far will his new film go in showing a backwater of his modernising country as a bad-ass dead zone? Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'
Adam Sweeting
Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre in his home town of Liverpool (where he was born in June 1964), Morrissey has amassed a huge list of credits on stage and in TV and film, and if you can judge an actor by the writers, directors and fellow-thesps he’s worked with, Morrissey has achieved triple-A status. Mind you, one of his proudest achievements was being invited by his beloved Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A few recent documentaries have challenged the definition of the genre through the cheerful and wholesale dramatic reconstruction of past events, key moments that weren’t captured by a camera at the time.This is unnerving to those of us brought up on old-school public broadcast TV where the rule was that even when what the director had put on screen was obviously a reenactment, a caption indicating "dramatic reconstruction" was obligatory. Not only did that mealy-mouthed phrase clutter the image, no matter which arty font was used, it also broke the viewer’s full engagement with the moment, Read more ...