Film
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the title of Matthias Glasner’s award-winning drama, and the death that swirls around its characters, dying isn’t really its subject, but the mess of living. Dysfunctional family, eccentric love affairs, addiction, depression, creative obsession that teeters towards suicide, and the worst advertisement for dentistry you will ever see – it’s all here, in a German canvass of misery and survival so casually engaging and provocative that its three hours pass far more smoothly than any number of action-packed, plot stuffed franchise pictures. Writer/director Glasner won the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted.Her second feature Attenberg (2010), about a 23-year-old virgin who doesn't want sex or like people, was an accentric marvel. Shortly afterward, Tsangari co-produced her friend Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps. Whereas Lanthimos has since made himself comfortable in Hollywood, Tsangari has taken a different route. She recently travelled to the Inner Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Comedian Tony Hancock’s vertiginous rise and fall is neatly traced in the two films he completed in the early 1960s. The warning signs were already present when 1961’s The Rebel (★★★★) was released. Hancock’s BBC career had been enormously successful, his eponymous radio series featuring him sparring with a talented supporting cast. The brilliant scripts were supplied by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. Despite the show's popular and critical success, Hancock's own insecurities were already taking root and led him to make the final season of the show's TV incarnation without regular partner Sid Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A glamorous black woman sits in a Forties bar under a Vichy cop’s gaze, cigarette tilted at an angle, till two male companions join her in clandestine conversation. The woman is Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), an influential Martinican journalist and essayist on Surrealism, feminism, Négritude (Francophone black consciousness) and an anti-colonial philosophy honed to a dangerous edge by the Fascist-aligned authorities. More intriguingly for director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, following this feverishly productive period, Césaire never published another word.That conventional biopic scenario, with Read more ...
James Saynor
Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like sheet music transfigured into the sound of an orchestra. Too often, though, the resulting film can resemble the sound of the orchestra trying to play in boxing gloves.Such worries arise for readers of Jim Crace’s rich and eloquent novel Harvest, published in 2013. It iridescently tells of an English rural community assailed by the enclosure movement, in which landlords fenced off common land to make money off sheep (a gambit that picked up steam in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have been turbo-charged, mad-staring, cringe-inducing figures occupying the centre of comedies and propelling them at least as far back as Molière, and continuing through John Cleese, Jim Carrey, and others.Robinson made his name in quickfire TV series consisting of sequences of gags, such as Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. Such sketch-based material is easy binge-fodder, but after a few episodes it can start to feel like a disposable, single-use product. It is therefore understandable Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”So says Gen, AKA Genesis P Orridge, AKA Neil Megson, in David Charles Rodrigues’s intimate portrait, filmed toward the end of his/her life, bare-chested, huge of torso, talking while posing in an artist’s studio for a larger-than-life portrait, getting up from the chair to gaze at their own image, tracing the contours of blue tattoos on the arms and torso, including that of a gun.This is a human being who, by their own account, died twice. Once Read more ...
graham.rickson
Heart of Stone (Das kalte Herz) was the first colour film produced by East Germany’s state film studio DEFA, a big-budget spectacular which attracted huge audiences upon its release in 1950.This adaptation of a macabre 19th century fairytale by Wilhelm Hauff was greenlit on the proviso that the film would be a parable about the virtues of hard work, lowly coal merchant Peter Munk’s downfall caused by his use of dark magic to improve his wealth and status rather than honest toil. DEFA brought in the West German Paul Verhoeven (not to be confused with the director of Robocop) to adapt and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A three-century-spanning countdown rapidly ticks to a version of now, and a beaten Superman (David Corenswet) ploughing into Arctic snow. His super-whistle fetches Superdog Krypto to excavate him like a favourite bone, and drag him to crystalline sanctuary the Fortress of Solitude. James Gunn’s vision for this fourth modern cinema Supes and DC Universe launch embraces the character’s simplicity and silliness as Zack Snyder constitutionally couldn’t. But by leaving the familiar origin largely implicit in a tale set three years into Superman’s adventures, the DCU’s hoped for new dawn Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a romcom be intellectually challenging while hitting all the sweet spots of the genre? Jonás Trueba, the director of the award-winning Spanish film The Other Way Around (Volveréis, literally “you will return”), has confected something close to that.The bare bones of his storyline are that a couple in Madrid, after 14 or 15 years (they don’t seem sure), have mutually decided to separate, and to throw a party in celebration of their split. Like people entering a marriage, they want to be sure their party is like a wedding, but “the other way around”. The action follows their elaborate Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The journey not the destination matters in The Road to Patagonia, an epic pilgrimage of 30,000 miles that, unexpectedly, turns into a love story. Surfer boy and ecologist Matty Hannon grew up in Australia but after reading a book at university about the shamans of Mentawai in western Sumatra he dropped out and went to live with them in the Indonesian rain forest.The prelude to Hannon’s film, which he assembled from 16 years of diary footage, celebrates the tenacity of the Salakirrat family in spite of efforts by politicians and clerics to outlaw their animistic culture: “We tell the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...