Film
Justine Elias
Earthrise, the 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of our small island of a planet, taken from the Moon’s surface, transformed our vision of our fragile home world. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, “is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”In I.S.S., a swift, smart science-fiction thriller set aboard the real-life international space station, a new crew member, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), is similarly awestruck, and humbled, by that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the most important character – though there’s a fine cast of well known mainly Irish actors.If you’re feeling hemmed in by concrete and city life, it’s a balm to take a deep breath and listen to the birdsong while watching the lake, the trees and the hills change colour through the seasons.Joe and Kate Ruttledge (Barry Ward and Anna Bederke) moved from London two years ago to live in this rural lakeside Irish community (it was filmed in Connemara). It’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. It’s gripping from the first frame to the last; the tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. In a heart-wrenching scene, his brother Paul (expertly played by Cam Riley) begs him to seek help.The film opens with Stephen (Stephen Giddings) watching The Arrest of Thomas Goudie, a film shot in 1901 about a real life bank clerk who Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just confronted him about a letter she found from the actress Ann-Margret, confirming her suspicion that the King of Rock'n'Roll has been unfaithful. Elvis's legs in their white trousers tower before her like the pillars of Graceland.This is just one of the many memorable images in Sofia Coppola’s delicate portrayal of Priscilla Presley, now available on Blu-ray and DVD. In the context of Coppola’s oeuvre, which includes such gems as The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis Daguerre in 1838 (main picture). Some 20 years later, in California, Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet – as to whether a galloping horse maintains contact with the ground – by setting up a string of cameras to record the animal galloping past. When he flicked through the resulting sequence of stills, an illusion of movement was created, and film was born.Fantastic Machine is a high octane trawl through the social history of the Read more ...
Justine Elias
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this pleasingly eldritch narrative debut by documentary-maker Paul Duane, it’s unclear whether the forbidden tune will turn out to be a love ballad, a curse, or both.Either way, the movie’s heroine, Anna (Simone Collins, pictured below), thrills at the thought of discovering for herself. Though she’s the talented frontwoman of a contemporary Irish folk group, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Teenage Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh in an elegantly restrained performance) is looking after his little sister and brother in Ulaanbaatar after their illiterate mother has returned to the countryside to look for work. They’ve run out of coal and wood and it’s freezing inside their yurt. “If only we could hibernate, like bears. Never get cold, never catch the flu,” says the brother.Director Zoljargal Purevdash’s remarkable debut, the first ever Mongolian film in the Cannes official selection, features impressive non-professional actors. She put out a casting call for kids from the Yurt district Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life of Christ destined to ruffle good Christians’ feathers. It turns out not to be the “new” anything, though: it’s refreshingly sui generis, as the Romans might have said.It opens with a dramatic orchestral chord, precisely timed to arrive at the exact same moment as the opening tableau of a mass Crucifixion, hanging in the midst of which is a grimacing Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield). We then flashback to an “early Sunday morning 33AD, Lower Jerusalem”, where Clarence and his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sam Taylor-Johnson has fashioned her biopic of Amy Winehouse with great care and affection, but sometimes, as she shows her subject discovering, love isn’t quite enough. The superb jazz-inflected singer from north London, who in 2011 joined the sad club of pop-culture luminaries who died at the age of 27, has already been given the documentary treatment by award-winning film-maker Asif Kapadia. Documentarists can expose their subject both visually and forensically, but a feature film has the tougher challenge of telling some of the same basic story without the mesmerising presence of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alex Garland’s fourth movie as writer/director is a chilling glimpse of an American dystopia, fortuitously timed for the run-up to the forthcoming US elections. However, it steers fastidiously clear of drawing any obvious Trump vs Biden parallels, though it’s difficult to imagine that it hasn’t imbibed any inspiration from the Maga mob’s insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021.Set in an imaginary near future, it’s the story of a group of news correspondents in the process of covering the civil war raging in the USA, in which the government forces are slugging it out with the Western Alliance, Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Teachers’ Lounge should really have been translated into English as The Staffroom, but that’s a minor gripe. Focussing on a class of 11-year-olds in a German secondary school, İlker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated feature shows school life as a microcosm of the outside world, showing what can happen “when a society, such as a school community, is poisoned with speculation and prejudices.”Leonie Benesch plays Carla Nowak, a young, newly appointed teacher. Idealistic and enthusiastic, she’s initially got her class exactly where she wants them: they’re working hard and treating her and one another Read more ...
graham.rickson
Happy End’s big draw is its central conceit, that of a convicted murderer narrating his life story backwards from the guillotine to the cradle. Made in 1967 by Oldfřich Lipský (1924-1986), renowned as a director of off-beat comedies, you wonder how on earth such a peculiar film was produced during such a turbulent time in Czechoslovak history.Lipský himself described Happy End as an experiment, “though not in the sense of the new waves…”, he and co-screenwriter Milos Macourek more worried about viewers finding Happy End incomprehensible than in any political interference. What could be a Read more ...