Film
Helen Hawkins
Reading an interview with the French director of Rodéo, Lola Quivoron, you come to realise her compelling film about dirt-bike-rider culture relied on a sage piece of casting. Despairing of ever finding a lead for her film project, Quivoron chanced upon Julie Ledru on Instagram and the first-time actor became a key creator of the narrative. The lone girl rider in a gang of illegal road-bikers, Ledru’s Julia (main picture) is a uniquely impressive character: mixed race, fearless, and far more emotionally intelligent than the young men she hangs out with. Ledru, like Julia, is from the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lisa Cortés’s fast-paced documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything opens with a TV interview made in 1971, 16 years after the rock 'n' roll pioneer became an overnight success with groundbreaking hits like "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly".Wearing a baby pink onesie and a crown-shaped tiara, Little Richard smiles coyly to camera, bats his beautifully made-up eyes, and says, “A lot of people say I’m shy, but I let it all hang out – the love, the tenderness, the kindness. You ain’t supposed to hide them; if you’ve got ’em, God damn it, show ’em to the world.”And show them Read more ...
graham.rickson
The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a booklet interview with David Thompson that Balthazar “was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the end”.Watching the earlier film after seeing EO highlights how very different the two films are. Bresson’s donkey is seen very much through the eyes of the humans who variously love and abuse him, while Skolimowski shows us a confusing, often Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his elimination, the urbane High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is forced to turn detective to learn their veracity. It’s not his fault that Inspector Clouseau might do a better job.Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.Set in Oslo and Gothenburg, it’s the story of 20-something Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who works in a trendy coffee shop and feels side-lined by her installation artist boyfriend, Thomas. She’s also jealous of her friends who have more interesting jobs and craves respect from them and from Thomas. A cool art gallery has just put on an exhibition Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It's fair to say that Pamfir, Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk's first feature, has been slightly overtaken by events.Set in the Carpathian mountains, on Ukraine's border with Romania, and filmed in the days and weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, this stylish movie captures the parochialism of life in the far west of the country, a thousand miles from the war, in a territory called Bukovina that was part of Hungary until World War II. Strangely enough, I watched Pamfir last week only hours after travelling through Bukovina, on the way out of Ukraine, and was struck by the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
AV Rockwell well deserved the Grand Jury award at Sundance in January for her debut feature film, A Thousand and One.It’s hard to believe that this subtle portrait of a troubled young woman trying to raise a child is the work of a first time writer-director, or that Inez, its gritty protagonist, is played with no vanity by the glamorous choreographer, singer, and reality TV star Teyana Taylor.We first meet Inez in prison where she’s doing her cellmate’s hair. It’s 1994 and she’s about to be released after a year inside. Back in her old Brooklyn neighbourhood, she is determined to get her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“This was an act of self defence,” is the last message we hear as How To Blow Up a Pipeline approaches the end of its 104-minute span. The speaker, a revolutionary environmental activist called Xochitl, has been arrested for her involvement in the demolition of oil pipelines in Texas, but in her view her arrest and the media frenzy surrounding it is all grist to her mill of shaking the world out of its climate-crisis apathy.Based on the book of the same name by Swedish academic Andreas Malm and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, How To Blow Up a Pipeline offers various instructive pieces of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) placed joint 48th with Ordet (1955), just ahead of The 400 Blows (1959) and The Piano (1992). Loden’s existential indie drama about an uneducated working-class Pennsylvanian woman (played by the writer-director herself) haplessly fleeing the role society allotted her might lack the intellectual heft of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the poll, but it’s the more accessible and compelling film.Loden made a diffident, self-deprecating guest when Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julia (Mia Farrow) stands jolting and shuddering, a butterfly pattern of blood on her blouse, shocking the ambulancemen on her doorstep. Her nine-year-old daughter Kate, who choked on an apple like Snow White before Julia cut her throat in a desperate tracheotomy, lies dead and unseen in the kitchen.This traumatic eruption into a quiet Kensington morning sends lingering tremors through this atmospheric, understated London ghost story. Based on the first horror novel by Peter Straub, an American genre master best-known for Ghost Story (1979), director Richard Loncraine shares Straub’s fine- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dracula’s fly-eating henchman Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) seeks solace in a self-help group from his co-dependent, fanged boss (Nicolas Cage), in a comic horror action flick which posits the pair as a vampiric Steptoe and Son – though that relationship was more genuinely nightmarish.The Dark Universe Universal hoped to create around its classic 1930s monsters crashed with the redundant medieval origin story Dracula Untold (2014) and braindead Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy (2017), but standalone hit The Invisible Man (2020) – ditching H.G. Wells for an Elisabeth Moss domestic abuse Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his investigation of a murder unpicks his faith in his department’s violent corruption, and the Arab Spring briefly brings that world crashing down. Now Cairo Conspiracy, a Cannes prize-winner for Best Screenplay and big hit in France, sees innocent Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) leave his fishing village to study at Cairo’s iconic Islamic university Al-Azhar. Read more ...