Film
Demetrios Matheou
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.And by the time Powell had entered his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, with The Spy in Black, in 1939, "Hitch" was on his way to Hollywood; while his career became international, Powell’s would, with the more English than the English émigré Pressburger by his side, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia doesn’t make you cry, you’re a hard nut to crack. The film records the fortunes of defectors fleeing North Korea, a hell hole that is more like a prison camp than a country.The phone rings with news that a family of five – an 80-year-old grandmother, her daughter, son-in-law and their two small girls – have crossed the Yalu River and are now trapped in China. They are desperate; if caught, they’ll be returned to North Korea to be tortured and either killed or sent to a concentration camp.The caller is part of the “underground railroad” network that helps Read more ...
graham.rickson
Not all Scorsese films are behemoths; Killers of the Flower Moon may last over three hours but After Hours, a low-budget black comedy released in 1983, packs an incredible amount into just 93 minutes.That Scorsese directed the film at all is a happy accident; Joseph Minion’s screenplay was set to be directed by the young Tim Burton, Scorsese opting to take it on after his first attempt to shoot The Last Temptation of Christ had collapsed.Filmed on location in New York, After Hours is dark, oppressive and claustrophobic. An early entry in the “yuppie nightmare” genre (see also Something Wild Read more ...
graham.rickson
Documentaries intended for cinema release don’t always come off, and cynics might suggest that Sheila Hayman’s Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn would work perfectly well as a BBC Radio 3 broadcast. Fortunately, Hayman’s visual flourishes and a sense of how to tell a good story make this film work.A closing caption points out, depressingly, that 90% of all music performed in the world’s concert halls is written by men, making the tale of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel all the more pertinent. Her biography is intercut with sequences showing pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason preparing to give the premiere of a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The story has often been told of how GW Pabst cast the American starlet Louise Brooks in his Berlin-made Pandora’s Box (1929) and fashioned his version of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu plays” around her transfixing performance as the helpless pan-sexual temptress – a projection of primarily male paranoia – who unintentionally destroys her would-be possessors. So, too, the story of the film’s role in the rediscovery and reinvention of its reclusive star as a writer and retired love goddess in the 1950s.Restored and re-released on a limited Masters of Cinema Blu-ray), Pabst’s sex tragedy has been Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in securing finance for projects. There were no Archers movies at all between The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Oh…Rosalinda!! (1955), and both of those "total films" bombed with critics and audiences who were then into realism and violently opposed to exotic spectacles.And so, as if to rehabilitate themselves within the ultra-conservative British film Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The stories told by writer-director Carol Morley are poignant reclamation projects that demonstrate empathy for lost or troubled souls but don’t flinch from difficult truths.In the documentary The Alcohol Years (2000), Morley’s subject is her vanished self, a promiscuous, hard-drinking Manchester teenager. The part-dramatised Dreams of a Life (2011) questions why over two years elapsed before the death of Joyce Carol Vincent, a well-liked 38-year-old, was revealed by the discovery of her remains in her bedsit in busy Wood Green. The Falling (2014), inspired by reported events, explores the Read more ...
James Saynor
Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is. She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out. This is because Aitor, amid an extended family in the Basque country, wants to go by the name of Cocó – no, make that Lucía, she later decides. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Since its release in 1999 David Fincher’s Fight Club has become something of a cult movie with young men who recite lines from the script like mantras. "This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time". It seems likely his new film, The Killer, will inspire the same devotion with the same demographic.Michael Fassbender plays the titular killer, a professional assassin who we first meet leading a monastic life in a stripped bare We Works office in Paris. He’s observing the luxury apartment building across the street, able to wait for days for his target to appear in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margot (Emilia Jones; Coda) has made a terrible mistake. She’s landed up in bed with Robert (Nicholas Braun; cousin Greg in Succession) and realises the sex is going to be excruciatingly bad.How to tell him that she’s changed her mind? Can she leave before it’s too late? Or is it easier to get it over with, otherwise he might turn nasty? Maybe, as a last resort, she can make herself get turned on by his gratitude. “Look how much he wants us,” she tells her better self, who watches, cringing, from a corner of the room.Director Susanna Fogel (Booksmart; The Flight Attendant), and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The first casualty of war is not truth, as the saying goes, but humanity – and not just in the sense of collateral damage. Media reporting turns victims into news items, along with satellite images of wrecked buildings or tanks crawling through a desert.It happens every time. This morning, on BBC News, the Palestinian journalist Taghreed El-Khodary patiently explained what the Israeli blockade of Gaza means in terms of journalism. No reporter can reach the scene of the catastrophe to bear witness. “The human stories are missing,” she added.The same was true of the Iraq War and now, two Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.I met Powell in his club, accompanied by his son Columba. It’s quite an uncanny experience seeing the two of them together in real life, so clearly warm and comfortable with each other. I’m familiar with them onscreen in Peeping Tom, made in 1960 when Columba was a child. He took Read more ...