Film
James Saynor
As everyone knows, the two most likeable creatures in the fictional world are the dog and the robot. Who doesn’t love a waggly tail or an aluminium cranium? So putting the two together in an animated movie looks like a Bennifer-perfect match.Robot Dreams pairs them, hand in hand, for walks in the park and rides on the subway in a bright, peppy feature that combines American optimism with mounting European angst. The film by Pablo Berger is a Spanish-French production based on a graphic novel by the American illustrator Sara Varon, and is set in a faithfully drawn New York of the 1980s, full Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from Argentine director Rodrigo Moreno is a wry parable about escaping the urban rat-race and searching for the meaning of life, viewed through the prism of a pair of world-weary Buenos Aires bank workers. Morán (Daniel Elias) hits upon a scheme of robbing the bank, then giving himself up for what he calculates will be a three-and-a-half year jail term. Meanwhile, his co-worker Román (Esteban Bigliardi) will hide the money until Morán gets out, whereupon they’ll divide the proceeds and live the free, liberated life they’ve long dreamed of.There’s an element of the hippy Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct panel.Originally a stage play, writer Jonathan Harvey’s screenplay drew upon his own experiences as an English teacher in South East London, and the banter, as funny as it’s cruel, struck me as painfully accurate. 1996 seems like another world – a time when Clause 28 forbade local authorities from "promoting" homosexuality, and the age of consent for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is writer-director Warwick Thornton’s third feature film, his first since 2017's excellent Sweet Country, and it took him 18 years to bring it to the screen. He describes it as “a really special one” with “a lot to say”, though viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.It’s a mysterious parable about an Aboriginal boy (Aswan Reid) who we first see involved in a fierce struggle with a mounted police patrol amid miles of Outback countryside, which comes to an end when he’s knocked unconscious by a boomerang. The story is set in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Monster is one of those films that you really shouldn’t read too much about before you see it, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to watch it all over again when it ends. It’s an intricately told psychological drama that grips from the start; a fire breaks out in a high rise building in an unnamed Japanese town. Neighbours watch from their balconies and gossip about the hostess bar in the building.One of the gawpers from a nearby flat is Saori (Sakura Andô below, last seen in Kore-eda’s Shoplifters). Struggling to balance work and home, Saori is upset when she finds that Minato Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a Coen brother directing, plus a cast that includes Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo and Margaret Qualley, the standout hitchhiker in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… so why does Drive-Away Dolls feel so insubstantial?Ethan Coen has co-written the script with his usual editor, also his (gay) wife, Tricia Cooke, and the talent has duly signed on. But even they can’t provide enough ballast. It’s a film of sporadically funny moments that strain to be bad-ass. The first such moment comes in the opening scene, a Philadelphia bar in 1999, where a jittery well Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley, the woman who put the punch in punchline, has what she would call a “mooth” on her. It delivers pith and grit and lots of short words needing asterisks. Though possibly not for much longer, as she is in the throes of ovarian cancer.But that didn’t stop her doing a tour called "Not Dead Yet" last year. The title is an echo of the mordant humour she has purveyed since embarking on a comedy career in 1994, after the family pub she and her husband Sean ran was taken over by his brothers. That the family was more the Sicilian kind is typical of Godley’s CV. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yihao is a disaffected 20 year old living in Chengdu, capital of Sichaun Province. A thriving centre for business and commerce, Chengdu looks like any other modern city. You could mistake it for downtown Chicago except that, apart from the Walmart logo, the signage is in Chinese.Yihao isn’t interested in making money, though. Having dropped out of school, he performs as a drag queen at Funky Town, a gay bar that welcomes young people who feel alienated from society. But the venue is earmarked for demolition to make way for a new subway station and Ben Mullinkosson’s documentary is a loving Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.There was a pro forma feeling to the roll call of winners under host Jimmy Kimmel's eye that saw, across nearly 3.5 hours, Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, and Robert Downey Jr win as best director, actor, and supporting actor, respectively – all prizes they had been expected to take.The same was true of Da'Vine Joy Randolph's supporting actress nod as Mary Lamb, the grieving cafeteria manager in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Fashion has a very short memory. Maybe that’s part of its charm,” says Robin Givhan of The Washington Post in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary. Whether anyone can forget John Galliano’s drunken anti-Semitic and racist outpourings at La Perle, his local café in the Marais in Paris in 2011, followed by his sacking by Dior, where he’d reigned as creative director for 14 years, is doubtful.But will people, or rather the fashion world, forgive him? It seems, judging by the acclaim for his recent Maison Margiela show in Paris, a spectacular, strange event (lots of corsets and cinched waists - on the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, about the key role caste systems play in subjugating whole racial groups, was a runaway success in the US in 2020. Here, the Pultizer-Prize winning black journalist is not so well known. Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of her book aims to change that.DuVernay has all the tools for creating a passionate polemic. She has already made a hard-hitting documentary, 13th, about egregious injustices in the US prison system that penalise blacks, as well as the TV series When They See Us, about the miscarriage of justice surrounding the Read more ...
James Saynor
Filmmakers of note make long movies for different reasons. Sometimes they may want the viewer to be so immersed in the movie they become “kidnapped” by it, to borrow an idea from Susan Sontag. (Epics by auteurs like Greece’s Theo Angelopoulis or Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan may be in this bracket.)Sometimes – whisper it softly – directors such as Martin Scorsese may not always have the full measure of a story’s pacing. And sometimes filmmakers are just bonkers trash-art weirdos who want to annoy the hell out of everyone, audiences and movie financiers alike. Such appears to be the case with Read more ...