Film
Graham Fuller
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of Journey’s End, and Terence Davies’s haunting swansong Benediction. For simplicity of form and style in rendering the pity of war – and the war waged by officers on their men – none improves on King and Country (1964).Joseph Losey’s desolating film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay at the peak of their powers, is set in a rat-infested British Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Joanna Hogg has made a film that resolves itself backwards: what happens in the final reel recasts what you have just seen completely. It’s something of a departure from her previous films in style, but equally probing and moving.The Eternal Daughter is the third Hogg film to feature a writer-director called Julie Harte, the lead character in The Souvenir I and II. Hogg explained at a recent Barbican Q&A that she had landed on making a film about her relationship with her mother back in 2008, after finishing her first feature film, Unrelated. But the outline she’d written for it Read more ...
David Nice
The only seriously false note about Maestro is its title. Yes, Bernstein was masterly as a conductor, and Bradley Cooper gives it his best shot. But he was no master of his life as a whole. Maybe the title should have been something like Lenny and Felicia (you think of something better).Broadway actor Felicia Montealegre, the woman he married after an on-off four-year relationship, is depicted as the shrewdest, harshest critic of the man rather than the artist, and though the music is brilliantly handled, Carey Mulligan is the real heart and soul of what Cooper as director and co-writer (with Read more ...
James Saynor
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned. Lost in the Night features characters lost at pretty much any time of the day in a slick, grim, ramifying desert mystery that never quite hits the escape velocity of thriller. At the start, the mother of young labourer Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is disappeared by the cops for campaigning against a local mine, and the main Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a faint whiff of Strictly Ballroom about Sasha Hadden’s Australian indie A Stitch in Time, another tale of people in later life rekindling lost dreams and a long-buried love while nurturing younger folk with the same passions. Here, though, this love is expressed in dressmaking rather than foxtrots and quicksteps. Hadden’s film is smaller-scale in its ambitions than Baz Luhrmann’s, not rising far above the feelgood. Which is a shame as it has an appealing central performance from Maggie Blinco as Liebe (yes, the German word for love), a repressed dressmaker in her seventies. She Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sam Green’s film 32 Sounds has been described as the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard, which is a pretty noisy claim – how does anyone know all the documentaries you’ve experienced? What is certainly true is that the way Green presents his films as immersive events, where musicians play the soundtrack live, the audience wear headphones and the director narrates, makes for a very unusual cinema experience. 32 Sounds, a film that’s both playful and meditative, explores what sound does to our emotional state and reflects on how the invention of recording Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Ridley Scott has taken umbrage at the French critics who weren’t too impressed with his new movie. Not only do they not like his film, but the French “don’t even like themselves”, according to the dyspeptic auteur.But I feel our French cousins may have a point, especially the one who described Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the fabled emperor as “a sullen boor and a cad with his wife, Joséphine.” Like Steely Dan sang, “I have never met Napoleon”, but one might reasonably expect that a man who masterminded a European empire which stretched from Spain to Poland and temporarily as far as Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1965, Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně) is that rare beast, a successful portmanteau movie. Five young Czech film makers each directed a segment, with two more contributions excised for reasons of length and later released separately.The individual chapters are based on short stories by Bohumil Hrabal (whose Closely Observed Trains was adapted by Jiří Menzel a year later), mostly taken from his 1963 collection Pearls of the Deep. Peter Hames’ booklet essay points out that Hrabal’s pithy tales “are about situations rather than narrative”, tending to focus on the oddballs and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mami Wata is the female West African water god still worshipped in Iyi, a fragile, matriarchal village redoubt against modernity. Writer-director C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third film makes Iyi a battleground for African identity, in a glistening black-and-white fable played out to the sea’s constant, low crash and wash.Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) is Mami Wata’s Intermediary, receiving the villagers’ tithe in return for divine protection. But when she can’t revive the drowned friend of her headstrong daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), the latter bitterly runs off with a vital totem, leaving her wiser Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s much to admire here – May December features impressive performances from Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, and director Todd Haynes shows his mastery of classic Sirkian style. But disappointingly, this comes across as a movie that aims to critique media exploitation of a scandal while indulging in its own manipulation. May December is a riff on a real-life story from the ‘90s, when Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle teacher in her mid-thirties had sex with a 12-year old boy in her school. At the time, she was married with four children of her own. When Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Ella Glendining has made an impressive documentary debut with the autobiographical essay, Is There Anybody Out There? Born without hip joints and very short thigh bones, we first encounter her as a perky, confident little girl walking in the woods near her home, in video footage filmed by her parents. They were aware from the first pregnancy scan that she was different and have done an exemplary job of ensuring that she had as happy a childhood as possible.As an adult Glendining’s confidence shines through and it informs her approach to the medical establishment throughout her Read more ...
James Saynor
This seems to be a season for films majoring on bisexuality, with the awards round encompassing Ira Sachs’s Passages, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a story of high-class high jinks in a modern twist on Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.Saltburn describes the bad education of an awkward young man, played by the electric Irish actor Barry Keoghan, at an English stately home, and follows in the path of those other two films in not giving bisexuality an especially good name. At least in Brideshead it was allowed a subtle nod and presented as a rite of passage, but Read more ...