Film
Saskia Baron
This fascinating American documentary tackles the societal and medical treatment of the 1.7% of people born with intersex traits that leave them with sex characteristics (chromosome patterns, genitals, gonads) that aren’t obviously male or female. These people are the ‘I’ in the LGBTQI+ acronym.We meet three charismatic and impressive campaigners who have intersex conditions.Their life stories are riveting, their arguments persuasive. Political consultant Julia Roth Weigel was born with XY chromosomes and instead of ovaries had testes, which were removed in childhood so the doctors could call Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles through it, stored cliffs of Anselm Kiefer’s work loom over him. Wim Wenders’ 3D cameras bring you inside the artist’s monumental, mythic world, which he is uniquely equipped to comprehend.The two men met and talked for weeks in 1991, losing regular touch when Kiefer moved to the French studio in rural Barjac where Anselm begins. Two further years of conversation and observation went into this film, which portrays its artist by shifting Read more ...
Justine Elias
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)In Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (all in their mid-to-late twenties) portray bro-buddies housemates who embark on a lighthearted and lightly-plotted quest for buried loot. When they lose their map, tensions flare.Marshall, gangly and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.Grigoris Karantinakis’s 2021 costume drama, originally released in Greece as Smyrna My Beloved, seems to be aware of uncomfortable historical parallels. It begins in 2015, Titanic-like, with a nonagenarian survivor rescuing something from the deep. In this case, Filio Williams (Jane Lapotaire), whose grandmother fled to Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic. We don’t see the moment when Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) told one of her two sons that she can no longer be their mother. That denunciation happened long before the film begins, when Monica ( Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-disc, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Arrow release reveals many memorable virtues, alongside surprising inertia and superficiality.Blackhat applies Mann’s great film intelligence and capacity for research to early cyber-crime, gleaning the apocalyptic consequences of malignant zeroes and ones. Rendering a keyboard transparent so he can shoot its hammering Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.His friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton called Prospect Cottage a charged place, acting as a battery for artists. It is particularly so this weekend, as the BFI’s Powell and Pressburger season sparks the first art made here since Jarman’s death in 1994. Powell + Pressburger: In Prospero’s Room draws on an obscure but profound connection. Jarman adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1979, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As the title character in Eileen, set in a miserable Massachusetts backwater in the days before Christmas 1964, Thomasin McKenzie plays a depressed hybrid of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty who’s awakened by a patently fake Princess Charming-cum-Hitchcock blonde.The new psychologist at a correctional facility for youths, Anne Hathaway’s mysterious Rebecca is equipped with above-it-all insouciance, a Marilyn hairdo, and a Harvard degree (she claims). Drab Eileen is smitten by this martini-drinking sophisticate and comes alive when Rebecca takes her under her wing. Hathaway and McKenzie make Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Fallen Leaves is Aki Kaurismäki’s 20th film, the one the Finnish director made after he said he’d retired from cinema in 2017 and frankly, if you didn’t like his earlier films, you shouldn’t bother with this one. But if you’re a fan (and I am and so was the Cannes jury which gave it the Fipresci prize), Fallen Leaves is an utter pleasure from beginning to end. There’s nothing hugely original here – you could probably play Kaurismäki Bingo spotting the familiar tropes. There’s a winsome dog, dour Finns drinking in drab bars watching laconic musicians and lonely souls Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It takes a brave or a foolhardy person to walk the streets wearing almost nothing but barbed wire and platform shoes, especially when the occasion is an anti-war demo in Moscow and the penalty for joining the march is up to 15 years in jail.It’s February 2022, Russia has invaded Ukraine and large numbers of protestors are chanting “No to War”; then as the police start pouncing, the chant switches to “shame on you”. Gena Marvin (whose pronoun is she) is among those bundled into a police van; the barbed wire outfit made her an obvious target.It’s not the first time the androgynous, LGBTQ+ Read more ...