Film
Demetrios Matheou
There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see it as a perfect locale for tales of human emotion in extremis, from David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter to Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. Perhaps it’s the tension between political discontent, privation and the gorgeous landscape that unsettles people, makes them behave badly. In the case of God’s Creatures, co-directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, you could even say it’s something in the water, literally: tides that can turn treacherous in seconds, making the work of the fishermen Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its material. This is a polemic, but one that burns steadily under the surface and asks the viewer to take a measured approach to its material.Fans of Adam Curtis documentaries will immediately recognise the unusual flavour of the archive material Pettengill has assembled in Riotsville USA: it reeks of its era of origin yet today seems surreal and other-worldly. She researched her material from 2015 to 2021 in multiple archives, including the US Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Last month’s Storyville: Sex on Screen (available on BBC iPlayer) was a slick, speedy (and repetitive) canter through the history of the sexual exploitation of women in Hollywood. It had star names like Jane Fonda, many references to the #MeToo movement, and praise for the new role of intimacy co-ordinators. It ended with a rallying call for women to take control of the camera and portray female erotic pleasure for themselves. Despite Sex on Screen taking us back to pre-cinema (Eadweard Muybridge) and acknowledging how erotically self-empowered Golden Age stars like Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night at the Barbican was my first experience of a film with live orchestra, which has become a big thing in the last few years. The film in question was Alexander Korda’s extraordinary HG Wells adaptation Things to Come, from 1936, imagining a century of the future.As ever with sci-fi, while it is fun to see what predictions turned out right and which wide of the mark, the main takeaway is what the film tells us about the anxieties of 1936. Things to Come has a notable symphonic score, by Arthur Bliss, the first to be released as a commercial soundtrack album, and the film that first Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I believe Ayahuasca is something very deep,” says spiritual leader José López Sánchez in the documentary Antidote. “It’s not like selling palm oil or rubber. How many gringos have been healed with Ayahuasca? How many have discovered things about themselves and made positive changes? We should create an alliance with the Westerners; it would be a new path.”Sánchez works at the Temple of the Way of Light, a healing centre for Western tourists deep in the Peruvian rainforest. Visitors come in increasing numbers to drink Ayahuasca mixed with chacruna, a hallucinogenic cocktail that induces Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Francisca Alegría’s debut is an eco-fable about mourning and enduring love, for a mother and Mother Earth. We start by Chile’s River Cruces, where a mill pumps poison, and the fish hear a death-song in the previously “sweet and clear” water. Magdalena (Mia Maestro), who drowned herself here decades ago, breaks the surface, gasping and suddenly alive, and walks back into the world.The family Magdalena left behind are meanwhile riven. Daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela, pictured below) is a surgeon in the city, raising her own young daughter Alma (Laura Del Rio) and teenage Tomás (Enzo Ferrada, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since the first John Wick film from 2014 became an unexpected hit, the Wick franchise has blossomed into a booming business empire, also including comic books, video games and upcoming TV spin-offs. The title role has transformed Keanu Reeves, who remains guarded about his spiritual leanings, into the Zen master of action heroes.At 58, Keanu may be getting a bit long in the tooth for these hyper-intense heroics, though he gently mocks himself by occasionally limping briefly after some especially taxing incident (falling off a tall building, for instance, or getting run over by a charging SUV Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It starts innocuously, with paint. A woman is sitting in a hardware store, studying a travel guide for colour ideas, while briefing the chap mixing her order. But then, amid the sound of the mixing machine, we hear a commotion on the street, a woman's voice cries “they are taking me”, doors are slammed. A dash of pink paint lands on the customer’s pristine blue shoe.These opening few minutes of Manuela Martelli’s exceptional debut feature, from Chile, typify its singular tone and approach. This is the kind of economical, elliptical political thriller in which Latin cinema excels, building its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.Infinity Pool is set in the fictional coastal nation of Li Tolqa – the film was shot in Croatia, but wherever it is, Li Tolqa is an impoverished police state with a draconian legal system which stipulates the death penalty for all crimes. Queasily inverted camera angles and shots of a menacing sunset and dark, roiling waves suggest Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Beasts (As Bestas) is all of two hours and 17 minutes long, and yet to look away is never an option. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reels the viewer in masterfully as he builds tension and suspense.A well-educated French couple are living out their rural dream in a valley in Galicia in north-western Spain. But there's a problem: the locals hate everything about them, and the couple's dream turns into one nightmare, and then many more. This is anything but the Spain of sunshine and allegría. Bleakness reigns here under rain and snow. There are visual imprints that just won’t Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Mr Williams (a wonderfully restrained, Oscar-nominated Bill Nighy) is taking time off work from his job in the Public Works department at County Hall in London. It’s the early Fifties and office life is very proper, with bowler hats and a strict hierarchy that reflects the class structure of Britain.He has stomach cancer but hasn’t informed his conventional son and grasping daughter-in-law, who live with him. Instead, he reveals his secret – “It’s rather a bore… the doctors have given me six months” – to a stranger (Tom Burke) whom he meets in a café in a seaside town. A pub crawl follows, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I'm proffering just a tad less than three cheers for Allelujah, the film version of Alan Bennett's 2018 Bridge Theatre play that is also that rare screen adaptation of Bennett not to be shepherded to celluloid by his longtime friend and collaborator, Nicholas Hytner.Instead, Richard Eyre is at the helm and why not, given that Eyre was running the National Theatre when Bennett and Hytner first hit it big together? And Eyre's stewardship allows him to call upon such totemic figures from different points in his storied career – amongst them, Julia McKenzie, Jennifer Saunders, and Judi Read more ...