Film
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Full Time opens in darkness. All we can hear is the sound of a sleeping woman breathing. It’s one of the few quiet moments in a film that follows Julie (Laure Calamy) as she scrambles to manage her life. Divorced with two young children, she lives in a village and commutes to Paris. It’s still dark when she drops off her kids with an elderly child minder and it’s dark again when she picks them up after a long day’s work in the city. The radio relays news of train strikes and protests, her journey is a nightmare of crowded replacement coaches. Work is overseeing a team of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fridtjof Ryder’s debut feature made a strong impression at last year’s London Film Festival, and its cinema release ought to give the Gloucester-born director’s career a hefty shove in the right direction. Although that doesn’t mean that Inland is an especially easy-viewing experience.Ryder, who was only 20 when he shot the film in 2020, deals in silences and absences. There isn’t much of a narrative, more of a cracked mosaic of memories, impressions and lurking anxiety, but Inland builds a powerful atmosphere of loss and brokenness. The photography is ominous and watchful. Events seem to Read more ...
Justine Elias
Wandering the wrecked streets of Memphis in search of blues and rock history, two teenage Japanese tourists debate who and what’s better: Elvis Presley vs. Carl Perkins, the sleek ultramodernity of their hometown Yokohoma vs. the “vintage” charms of a nearly deserted Tennessee train station.He’s cool and poker-faced, she’s sweetly extroverted, but they’re young and in love, and no matter how much they argue, the road-tripping couple (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) discover America in a way that natives rarely do. And check out an exchange between her and a downtown denizen who asks for a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable ordeals on the long road of existence only to be met at the end by the Broadway legend Patti LuPone?Some trips are worth the destination and, running a fully felt three hours, this film is one of them, if not for a final sequence that lets the Juilliard-trained LuPone let rip: we all know she played Eva Peron but on this evidence, I'd love to have Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.A diminutive impish South Korean, Paik was born into an eminent wealthy Seoul family, on a par with the Samsungs, and by 17 knew he had to get out. He had become a Marxist, then a communist. His intellectual interests would take him to Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, atmospheric movie is mainly faithful to Judy Blume’s iconic novel, fans will be relieved to know, though transferring such an interior life on to the screen is by definition problematic. It Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This almost forgotten, naturalistic 1976 road movie lets four young Frenchmen off the leash in a cross-country trip from Lille to Cannes.Car salesman Klouk (Bernard Crombey) is forced by his oppressive boss to ditch a promised weekend with his wife to deliver a rich man’s Chevrolet to his Cote d’Azur mansion. His wife is contemptuously resigned to such defeats. His goofy, probably gay nurse friend Philippe (Xavier Saint-Macary) tags along, and they pick up abrasive Charles (Étienne Chicot) and his dreamy, dependent flatmate Daniel (Patrick Bouchitey, pictured bottom right with Chicot) along Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s not a great moment for older audiences contemplating an outing to the cinema. They could have their intelligence insulted with the feeble, sugary comedy, Book Club: The Next Chapter or they could choose Plan 75 and find themselves looking nervously over their shoulder. This debut feature by Chie Hayakawa is a sombre drama set not too far in the future. The Japanese government has come up with a tempting solution to the problem of the country having the highest proportion of elderly people in the world.There are simply too many senior citizens who are dragging down the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The titular character in Juraj Herz’s Morgiana plays a peripheral though important role, some of the film’s most striking visual flourishes (courtesy of legendary cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera) being her point-of-view shots while she scurries in and around the dusty lodge owned by her mistress Viktoria. Morgiana is actually a very photogenic Siamese cat, the perfect companion to Iva Janžurová’s witch-like Viktoria. Outraged at learning that her late father has left the bulk of his estate to his other daughter Klára, Viktoria takes revenge by dosing her sister with a slow-acting poison. Herz Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I was once invited to join a book club by a bunch of friendly, clever women. But their conversation began with whether they liked the novel’s central characters enough to imagine having dinner with them and from there, descended into swapping tips about conquering visible panty line and the effectiveness of various moisturisers. I didn’t last long (two sessions, maybe three), which is one way to warn anyone bothering to read this one star review, that I am probably not the ideal demographic audience for Book Club: The Next Chapter.We first meet Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that create the male gaze have entered cinema’s DNA and become standard across the genders, for makers and watchers alike. “It’s like a law,” she says. This is bad news for us all, she argues, not just cineastes.The documentary uses as its framework a 2018 lecture Menkes gave to her film production students at CalArts in Los Angeles. We cut to and from it Read more ...