Film
Justine Elias
Live-action movies for the under-12 set are rare. Rarer still are those that capture the anarchic spirit of middle-grade children gone wild. Writer-director Weston Razooli made a splash at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals last year with Riddle of Fire, an adventure tale that draws inspiration from Disney’s earnest, spirited TV fare of the 1970s.Set in the mountains of Wyoming, it follows three young friends as they rage around the great outdoors on dirt bikes, armed with paintball guns and plenty of ammo. They begin with a warehouse heist, in which best pals Alice, Jodie, and Hazel steal Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Begin the mission and the funds will come,” says feisty, tubercular nun Francesca Cabrini (Christiana Dell’Anna; Patrizia in Gomorrah) to Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) in 1889. She specialises in defying expectations, especially when men tell her she should stay where she belongs. She became the first American saint, canonised in 1946.Directed by Christian conservative Alejandro Monteverde, whose Q-Anon-approved movie Sound of Freedom about child sex-trafficking was, disquietingly, a controversial hit last year, this biopic is overlong, sanitised and sepia-toned, awash with angelic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Israel-Palestine conflict aptly infuses a haunted house in Muayad Alayan’s story of layered loss. The Shapiro family home in Jerusalem which grieving British-Jewish husband Michael (Johnny Harris) and daughter Rebecca (Rebecca Calder) retreat to as a sanctuary already bears the pain of past Palestinian owners, as ghost stories multiply.This is a girl’s adventure story from 10-year-old Rebecca’s perspective, as she longs for her mum, dead in a car crash in which Rebecca was a passenger, hurt repressed by her dad. “I keep trying to hide everything that might trigger her past,” he tells a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of employability that must make many of his fellow-actors green with envy, Modine has been clocking up a stream of memorable performances for 40 years on both the small and big screens.The title role in Alan Parker’s Birdy (1984), where he played opposite a fledgling Nicolas Cage, signalled the shape of things to come. His performance as Private “Joker” Read more ...
James Saynor
Adaptations of Henry James have often failed to click over the years. The author’s private, introspective works – sightseeing trips around people’s souls – seem hard to transpose into a crowded gathering where someone keeps yelling “Action!”.So it’s a bit surprising that three reworkings of his ever-so-subtle 1903 story, The Beast in the Jungle – by Brazilian, Dutch and Austrian directors – have reached the screen since 2017, one of them last year. You might think this proves that buses always arrive in threes, but you’d be wrong. For here comes a fourth version of the story from France’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s interesting to discover that sound wasn’t the norm in Japanese cinema until the mid-1930s: the huge cost of investing in pricey new studio technology and equipping scores of rural cinemas with amplification proving prohibitive.Yasujirō Ozu began his directorial career began in 1927 but didn’t make a sound film until 1937, and 1932’s I Was Born, But… is notable for the paucity of surtitles, Ozu telling an emotionally complex story brilliantly using mostly visuals alone. What initially looks like a light comedy about squabbling children becomes something much weightier: in Ozu’s words, “I Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In the way of Batman being overshadowed by his villains, in his last outing, Mad Max: Fury Road, the erstwhile hero of George Miller’s dystopian action series had to take a back seat (literally and metaphorically) to the shaven haired, one-armed, kick-ass powerhouse that was Furiosa. Apparently, Miller had plans for a Furiosa origin story even before he shot Fury Road, correctly predicting the popularity and immediate icon status of the character he’d created. With Anya Taylor-Joy taking on the role from Charlize Theron (true to the spirit of his filmmaking, Miller has eschewed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious about the mythic American West Coast. If you lived in Detroit or Deptford, it looked like a wonderland indeed.But as we now know from a variety of books and documentaries, the history of the Beach Boys would prove to be long, tortuous and bittersweet, littered with casualties and various kinds of heartbreak. Disney+ have brought the heavy mob in to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anita Pallenberg was a vital presence in the Stones’ most vital years. Her bright eyes and hungry mouth betrayed a ferocious appetite for pleasure and adventure, taking her from a nun-schooled Rome childhood to New York’s downtown art crowd, then modelling in Munich, where in 1965 she engineered an encounter with “shy” Keith Richards, a similarly callow Mick Jagger and her first, violent Stones lover Brian Jones. Richards saved her from Jones’ paranoid abuse in 1967, and they became notorious outlaw lovers for the next decade.Co-directed by Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom, both associates of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
He’s not the kind of actor who has paparazzi following him around Beverly Hills or staking out his yacht in St Barts, but Eddie Marsan, born into a working class family in Stepney in 1968, has amassed a list of acting credits that your average superstar will never be able to match.On the big screen he has appeared in such diverse productions as Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, V for Vendetta, Me and Orson Welles, Warhorse, Atomic Blonde, Hancock and Entebbe, and he plays Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch in the new biopic Back to Black.He’s also part of Guy Ritchie’s regular stable, having appeared in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not that he's impolite now, but the raucous stage presence and vibrant chatshow interviewee was yet to fully form.Murray Grigor's film, which follows Connolly's first gigs in Ireland in 1975, shows the comedian long before he achieved the national treasure status he now enjoys. The Dublin and Belfast dates came just after Connolly's appearance on Michael Parkinson's chat show had made him an overnight star, and backstage in Dublin the Glaswegian frets Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What with the likes of Sexy Beast, Layer Cake, The Hatton Garden Job and the oeuvre of Guy Ritchie, the British gangster movie has become its own quaint little genre, a bit like an offshoot of the Ealing comedy with added thuggery, swearing and arcane London patois. Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire is a slightly ramshackle version of the above, evidently made on a tight budget (with the assistance, bizarrely, of Middlesex University) and written, starring and directed by Michael Head.As gangster patriarch George Scuderi (Frank Harper) tells us in a brief prologue to Bermondsey Tales Read more ...