Film
Justine Elias
Medusa is having a moment. From Natalie Haynes’ feminist novel to the recent Brazilian horror movie, the beleaguered, beheaded, snake-haired monstress of Greek myth rises again, and again, as a symbol of female rage and resistance.Now comes Medusa Deluxe, a stylish, comedic murder mystery set at a hairdressing competition. Keep a close eye on those scissors: the struggle to control hair (real and fake), “the crown you never take off”, has already turned deadly as the film begins.Though one of the top contenders, the never-seen Mosca, has turned up dead – scalped! – at his stylist’s chair, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This frothy bio-fantasy about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and top tunesmith to Marie Antoinette at the French court, could have been a powerful and revealing shout-out to a woefully under-appreciated composer.Directed by Stephen Williams with a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, it’s more like Bridgerton Goes to the French Revolution, an absurd bouillabaisse of melodrama and characters who may be elegantly dressed but are uniformly paper-thin.Bologne was born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and an Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Set on the lands of the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota, War Pony focuses, in a hazy way, on the lives of 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), who has two toddler sons with two different mothers, and 12-year-old Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) who seems to have no mother at all. Both are struggling to get by. Drugs, violence and chaos rule on the Pine Ridge reservation. The women are mainly exasperated with the men. A poodle called Beast also plays an important role.It’s an extraordinary film: bleak, gritty, tragic, sometimes funny, and a seemingly unlikely directorial debut from actress Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mario Bava and Dario Argento are cited as key influences on Robert Sigl’s debut feature Laurin (1989). British viewers will also be reminded of the series of MR James ghost story adaptations broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s; a glimpse of a murdered child peering through a window eerily similar to a terrifying sequence in Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s macabre Lost Hearts. Éva Martin’s ornate, candle-lit sets are also redolent of vintage period drama.Sigl was in his mid-twenties when he wrote and directed Laurin, and it’s a surprise to learn that such a bold, confident debut didn’t lead to greater Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The inspirations for the directing debut of Benjamin Millepied, choreographer and dancer in Black Swan, are cited as Merimée’s novella Carmen and Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, the former better known as an opera guaranteed to raise the emotional temperature. Millepied has employed the brilliant Succession composer Nicholas Britell for some of the music; and, in the kind of tender-hearted beefcake role he has shown he can play so effectively, he has Paul Mescal. So why doesn’t this Carmen knock it out of the park?It seems to have taken three writers to craft the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Needy, truculent, and aggressive, an in-your-face stick of intensity and guilt-inducing melancholy, privileged young Amanda in Carolina Cavalli’s downbeat comedy is the girl no one wants to end up talking to in the kitchen at parties. So empathetic is Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal of this emotional aggressor, however, that it’s difficult not to root for her. Especially if, per William Blake, one’s bag is eternal night rather than sweet delight. Newly returned from studying in Paris, Amanda has been welcomed back into the matriarchal family’s bosom like a virus and is staying in a Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are a few perils to saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as Janette Manrara discovered on this opening night of Disney’s anniversary arena jaunt. Trying to divide the Glasgow crowd into sections to sing the song, Manrara tripped over who was to sing what, something only notable because the rest of the evening was possessed of an almost overpowering slickness.Although the opening overture went all the way back to Steamboat Willie, nearly all of the set, which featured a full orchestra, a rotating array of singers supplied from the West End and a likeable, cheerful hostess in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Devoted fans may not learn anything that new about Noel Coward from Barnaby Thompson’s documentary Mad About the Boy, but they will doubtless see some new things. And those who know “the Master” only from his early plays, hardy perennials these days in British theatres, will marvel at the sheer range and volume of his output.Thompson has been given access to archive materials, including Coward’s home movies, by his estate, and these provide a welcome garnish to the bare bones of his CV. See Coward propelling himself on a lilo across the sea at the foot of his beloved Jamaican property. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Studio Canal’s restored print of the 1953 documentary The Conquest of Everest is so sharp, so clear that initially it’s hard to believe that we’re not watching a studio reconstruction. Skies, snowscapes and sunlit uplands glow; it’s only in the perilous final stages that things turn murkier.Do listen to the bonus interview with producer John Taylor, recounting his struggle to get the film financed after a tip off that a British attempt to climb Everest was imminent, and the mad rush to edit the footage against a very tight deadline. Poet Louis MacNeice’s hastily-written commentary, spoken by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Gardener Narvel (Joel Edgerton) sniffs soil the way Blue Velvet’s Frank inhaled gas, finding erasure and release. Following Ethan Hawke’s priest in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s titular job in The Card Counter (2021), Paul Schrader’s latest driven protagonist verges on absurd, finding solace in pruning before deploying his secateurs with a prior, particular set of skills.Narvel is the head gardener at the plantation-style estate of aristocratic Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). He’s a middle-aged historian and philosopher of horticulture, keeping a journal at a monastic desk. “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tunisian lives unfold over a working day in Erige Sehiri’s debut Under the Fig Trees, with fig-picking the backdrop to furtive, sparking collisions between men and women. Love, liberation and oppression all take their turn under the sun as community is strengthened or challenged, and a society is subtly implied.Sehiri has a documentary background, and cast non-professionals from her Kesra setting. The naturalistic, improvised performances seem effortlessly real, but this isn’t prosaic non-fiction. The play of changing light and shade marking the day, the loving framing of beautiful faces Read more ...