Film
Graham Fuller
The cartoonist Gerald Scarfe – or his equally mordant forebear George Cruikshank – couldn’t have drawn a seedier Eurotrash excrescence than the crooner, Richie Bravo, who dominates Ulrich’s Seidl’s Rimini.A hasbeen still purveying his Eighties-style Schlager pop to his few surviving female fans, porcine Richie – he of the dirty-blonde mane, sealskin coat, sexagenarian bloat, and oily seduction shtick – rivals in cringeworthiness the Demis Roussos lusted after by Beverly in Abigail’s Party.The wrinkle in Seidl’s latest chilling satire of moral baseness is that Richie (played by fellow Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mathieu Amalric's Hold me Tight (Serre moi fort) keeps springing surprises. Perhaps the first is the title. It sounds like an invitation to settle down with the popcorn to enjoy a light French film dealing with intimacy. Not even close. It's a quote from a song by Étienne Daho. Apparently, Amalric could just as well have called it the opposite: “Serre moins fort” (hug less tight). He has also said the ideal title (“if it hadn’t already been taken” by Douglas Sirk) would have been Imitation of Life.That is telling. The film is a melodrama, a constant Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The fascinating story of the silent twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were incarcerated in Broadmoor for 12 years for minor crimes, has been told before, several times. There’s a 1986 BBC film by Jon Amiel based on Marjorie Wallace’s book about them; a documentary by Olivia Lichtenstein in 1994; a French rock opera; a classical opera, and a play.You might think enough has been said – their parents, who stopped giving interviews, would probably agree – but their story remains elusive. In her hazy, hallucinatory version of events, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure; Fugue) Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paramount added a late “old dark house” mystery comedy to Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939 by teaming Bob Hope with Paulette Goddard in The Cat and the Canary, skilfully directed by Elliott Nugent. The death-trap mansion in the Louisiana bayous where family members gather to hear the reading of the deceased owner’s will – his niece Goddard inherits it – proved the perfect venue for Hope’s hilariously pusillanimous shtick.The movie was a hit, so the stars were reunited in an identikit picture, 1940's The Ghost Breakers. Adding a gangster intrigue to the genre mash-up, it was based on a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.They smile, wave, and jostle each other. One or two of the kids pull faces. It could be any old amateur footage by a holidaymaker visiting a distant town where the locals are unused to cameras. But this is Poland in 1938 and what we are seeing is a community that was about to be destroyed. These precious few minutes of celluloid were found in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is Noah Baumbach’s most capacious, overreaching work, corralling Don De Lillo’s novel of catastrophising, neurotic academia into a film jazzily dependent on rhythm, hooked on language and wildly diverse in tone.Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a paunchy, middle-aged professor of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern city in 1985, married to Babette (Greta Gerwig), with three kids who act as a hyper-articulate Greek chorus. He dreads death, suffering nightmares of a foreign figure in his bedroom, and closer still, beneath the suffocatingly stretched bedsheet where his wife should be, scenes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made their home region of Liège the site of excruciating moral crises and crushing injustice. Their 12 masterful, double Palme d'Or-winning films act as parables for the embattled human soul.The latest, Tori and Lokita, sees two paperless child migrants, 12-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 16-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), form a familial bond in the face of ruthless criminals and oppressive bureaucracy. There is furious energy as Tori pumps his bike down neon city streets on a drugs run, and stygian despair when Lokita is walled away in a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes are Belgium’s national conscience. The brothers, who have been sharing the roles of writer-director-producer since their first film in 1996, make humanist dramas about desperate people trying to survive in a harsh world.You don’t go to their movies (The Unknown Girl, The Kid with a Bike, Rosetta) expecting escapist adventures. But their latest film, Tori and Lokita, while heartbreaking and grim, is also gripping with several sequences of ingenious tension worthy of a thriller.We meet Lokita (Joely Mbundu) first; she’s a teenager being interrogated by the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. This reasonably edited conversation occurs toward the closing act of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia), a 1981 Hungarian animated epic, defies easy description, Marcell Jankovics’ film blending folklore and psychedelia to startling effect.There’s violence, heartbreak, black humour and romance, all accompanied by István Vajda’s harsh but striking electronic score. Acclaimed on its original release and ranked highly on critics’ lists of best animated films, Son of the White Mare has been hard to find in recent years, making this reissue all the more welcome. You can’t help wondering what the youthful target audience made of it. Jankovics recognised that young Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I bow to no one in my affection for Matilda the Musical onstage, which I've loved across multiple iterations, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the West End and Broadway, and numerous cast changes, too.But Matthew Warchus's screen iteration of his Roald Dahl-inspired ongoing London hit is an entirely separate triumph in and of itself, smartly adapted and ever so slightly reconceived so as to sneak the occasional nifty political reference into its universal tale of childhood angst.As in the theatre, how can one not immediately warm to material in which the mere mention of literature excites the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel is an even more brightly entertaining puzzle picture, revelling in the old-fashioned glamour of enviably sunny climes and another rogues’ gallery of piquantly deployed film stars. Self-styled world’s greatest detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is again on hand to pick up the inevitably murderous pieces.Filmed during lockdown, Glass Onion is a delayed pick-me-up for those restrictions, packed with cinematic endorphins. Blanc is in a rut in this caseless, Covid world, till he’s invited to the private Greek island of tech mogul Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for a Read more ...