Film
Graham Fuller
Ken Russell’s horror comedy Gothic (1986) compresses into one nightmarish night the fabled three days in June 1816 when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) entertained at his retreat Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), Shelley’s partner Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr).Already in situ, Byron’s friend and physician John William Polidori, played by Timothy Spall as a sycophantic worm enamoured of his host but capable of kindness to Mary, made up the party.Both women are 18 and in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Optimistically billed as John Travolta’s comeback, writer-director Nicholas Maggio’s debut is an effective Southern noir, with Travolta an authoritative but peripheral presence.Mob Land is mostly about Shelby Connors (Shiloh Fernandez), a small-town ex-racing driver with Parkinson’s, struggling to make ends meet with his wife Caroline (Ashley Benson) and daughter. Repossession threatens his home, where Caroline’s brother Trey (Kevin Dillon, pictured below left with Fernandez) spends his time, and suggests the bad choice that will send them to hell. A local pharmacy is a Mob front pushing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food in the cupboard, even if it’s been paid for from the proceeds of selling the bikes Georgie has stolen. Though her mother died recently, social services aren’t too fussed as they believe her uncle is looking after her. They don’t think it’s odd that he’s called Winston Churchill, or that when they phone to check up, he answers their Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Fans of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's timeless classic The Red Shoes shouldn’t rush to The Red Shoes: Next Step expecting a sequel. This sentimental Australian teen drama is more of a step-change than a follow-up.At least its American star, Juliet Doherty, was a professional ballerina before she took up acting – as was her Scottish counterpart, Moira Shearer, in the 1948 film – so the dance sequences feel pretty authentic, even if they’re shot in semi-darkness for some reason.The two movies have other things in common. The denouement in Powell and Pressburger’s masterful film Read more ...
James Saynor
Thespians and thieves have often pooled their resources in movies, notably in the work of Woody Allen. Since acting is basically a form of lying, goes the joke, actors dine at the same Runyon-esque table as people who nick stuff, and this French comedy offers a new story of a crim who needs some muscle from the theatrical arts.Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg) is an actor at a time of life when she wants to quit the stage and settle down with a charming, burly convict called Michel (Roschdy Zem), whom she met when giving an acting class at the local Lyon slammer. She dotes on him to the point of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman’s 1974 evocation of 1930s Mississippi, wasn’t a commercial hit on its original release, even though Pauline Kael called it a masterpiece.This Depression-era tale of a trio of hapless bank-robbers was shot on location with no star names. Keith Carradine plays Bowie, the youngest of the thieves who have just escaped from a chain gang. In jail since he was 16, he has a naiveté that Carradine captures beautifully.Holed up in a small town, the loose-limbed Bowie falls for a local girl, Keechie, played by Shelley Duvall in her first major role. Struck by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable, his debut also resists the grim “adult” gravitas routinely borrowed from Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s Eighties comics, popping with bright colours and breezy, communal humanity.Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, pictured below) is our teenage hero, forced to give up post-college ambitions when his family home is threatened with repossession in Palmera Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of facing up to the truth about yourself. However, instead of Stop With Your Lies, we get Lie With Me.The faux pas, if that’s what it is, is hardly the movie’s fault, although a movie star, Molly Ringwald, is to blame. She isn’t in the film, which has an all-male cast except for two walk-on roles, but it was Read more ...
James Saynor
Experts in irony tend to see life as faintly absurd, relatively meaningless and usually circular. They’re too self-aware to be neurotic and live life in short bursts, letting out little private snorts of dry, amused exasperation at frequent intervals.German filmmaker Christian Petzold seems like an irony boffin and offers up characters sunk in inconsequence, with the repetitive life injuries that a plughole-orbiting existence can give you. He knows that tedium is an odd joy of cinema and his movies can be slow wind-ups. But he can afford to be laid-back with his storytelling because he’s such Read more ...
Justine Elias
Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-adolescent girls who undergo rigorous training to prepare them for (or protect them from) the perils of womanhood, Lucile Hadžihalilović forged a daring path into the unknown. With her first English-language feature, she journeys even further. Told this time from the perspective of an adult, Earwig – based on the experimental novel by B Catling Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White People) at least professes himself a fan of the titular attraction, and with screenwriter Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation, Paul Feig’s female Ghostbusters) slips humanity into the corporate shilling.Simien personalises and improves on the original 2003 Eddie Murphy vehicle via casting and character detail. Protagonist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Emanuele Crialese’s latest, L’immensità, is an oddity. It’s perfectly formed, yet still feels as if its final reel went missing. Its title – usually translated as “infinity” – is typical of this enigmatic quality. “L’immensità” turns out to be a hit Italian pop song from the late 1960s, which finally plays over the end credits; its lyrics are about being just a speck in an infinite universe, though one that perhaps will turn into a butterfly, redeemed by the love of somebody special. If you aren’t au fait with the song, Crialese makes you wait a long time to have the title unpacked. Read more ...