Film
Saskia Baron
There’s no shortage of documentaries about movie stars, film directors and production studios in their heydays, but very little attention has been paid to the cinemas that showed the movies they made or the diverse audiences they attracted.Opening in the UK after a very successful lap around the world’s film festivals, is Scala!!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits. That breathless title itself hints at the unknown pleasures (and breakneck nostalgia) to come from co-directors Jane Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Sofia Coppola knows a thing or two about teenage girldom. Like many of her other characters – in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere and Marie Antoinette – the subject of her latest film, Priscilla Presley, is an ingenue living in a gilded cage and surrounded by lavish boredom. It hardly matters whether the setting is actually the Park Hyatt Tokyo, Chateau Marmont, the Palace of Versailles – or Graceland, in this case.The song remains the same. Written and directed by Coppola, Priscilla is a tortuous journey into the dark heart of celebrity. Yet the well-known story follows an Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The movies haven’t been kind to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Nutcracker Suite was a highlight of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) perhaps, but the 1969 Soviet biopic directed by Igor Talankin was tedious and Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, released two years later, worse than that.Tchaikovsky’s Wife, written and directed by the talented Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, tells the story of Antonina Miliukova, who married Tchaikovsky in 1877 and then went mad because she couldn’t reconcile herself to the composer’s homosexuality.It should have been obvious to the smitten Miliukova (Alyona Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?” says film director Tomas (Franz Rogowski) to his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw), a printmaker. Tomas is full of excitement about his night with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos); Martin is resigned, pale, doesn’t want the details. This always happens when you finish a film, he says. Take a nap, relax. But Tomas has thrown their relationship into crisis.Relaxing is not something that comes easily to Tomas, who’s driven by his impulses and expects everyone to be endlessly indulgent of his mercurial desires. When they’re not, he crashes. He Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Just as Napoleon may be Ridley Scott’s most autobiographical subject, so motor-racing potentate Enzo Ferrari’s mastery of streamlined speed seems made for Michael Mann. But where his best films’ cool control accelerates into calibrated mayhem, Ferrari mostly stays underpowered.Mann focuses on four months in 1957, when his company’s survival hinges on Enzo (Adam Driver) attracting investment with a win at the Mille Miglia, a daunting thousand-mile race around Italy’s public roads, while his domestic double-life with wife Laura (Penélope Cruz, pictured below) and long-term secret mistress Lina Read more ...
theartsdesk
Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preferenceSaskia BaronAnatomy of a FallBrokerFallen LeavesJoylandKillers of the Flower MoonOtto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror StoryReturn to SeoulSt OmerScrapperA Thousand and OneThe reason I go to the cinema is mainly to experience other people’s lives and thoughts but also to escape for a few hours from the gerbil wheel of anxiety about the world that spins constantly in my head. 2023 was not a great year for anyone of a fretful disposition, but these were the movies that for a while made me happy and distracted in the dark of the movie Read more ...
James Saynor
For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)A more shocking shellacking was a year earlier when American Samoa lost 31-0 to Australia in a World Cup Qualifier. It was the biggest loss in international football history, or possibly in school playground history, or possibly in back garden history against the dog – and is now the starting point Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years. The film opens with an apocalyptic fire; it’s night, the air raid sirens howl and the skies are filled with flaming fragments. We hear the frantic breathing of a boy, running towards the burning Tokyo hospital where his mother works. It’s 1943, the Pacific War is raging and Read more ...
James Saynor
You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.It’s an ambling, facetious character-piece about hopeless classless numpties going round in circles, a film with surprisingly zero dud notes for a first-time moviemaker. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unlike, say, Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Powell’s working relationships with musicians were cordial, particularly his collaborations with composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale.Gray, born Józef Żmigrod in Poland in 1902, had met Emeric Pressburger while working for UFA in the Weimar Republic, their paths crossing again in the early 1940s. Fleeing Nazi Germany for the UK in 1934, Gray was briefly interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man after war broke out, Vaughan Williams among those calling for his release as “a musician of distinction”.Gray subsequently provided music for Read more ...
Kristin M Jones
“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.”Even as they are in danger of drowning in the same way, he is recounting a legend in which a prince is doomed to death in the whirlpool Corryvreckan. Mystical forces are woven through the film, and all conspire to help love conquer materialism.Powell and Pressburger began work on I Know Where I’m Going! after they postponed making A Matter of Life and Death Read more ...
David Nice
In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.Who knows, it could have been a masterly triptych as the film-maker’s operatic trio was not – somewhat ironically, since of course the collaborator on the earlier Read more ...