Film
graham.rickson
Kuhle Wampe is a fascinating curio, a blend of documentary, social realist drama and political debate which so bothered the German authorities upon its release in 1932 that they promptly banned it. The censorship board’s justification condemned the film as one “which shakes the foundations of the state”, most pointedly in its depiction of official indifference to poverty and the search for work.Written by Bertholt Brecht and mostly directed by Slatan Dudow, the film opens with a montage of newspaper headlines charting rising unemployment statistics. There’s little dialogue; the well- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Oh no. Not that orange knife and male genitals thing again. In 1976, Marco Ferreri set La Dernière Femme in Créteil in the outskirts of Paris – I was working in a school there, so the memory does tend to stick – and set out to shock audiences by having the main character, played by a young Gérard Depardieu, cut off his life expectancy with the aid of a Moulinex electric kitchen knife.Fast forward to the orange knife in Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Bloody Oranges (Oranges sanguines). This one is of the DIY store variety, but the clear intention to shock, provoke, and repel is very similar. In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist.From this bedrock of delusional artistic struggle, grotesquerie and hurt, Safdies associate Owen Kline’s debut carves a queasy slice of observational tragicomedy.His milieu is a highly personal comics subculture barely seen in cinema since Crumb, where the likes of Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes (Ghost World) paralleled grunge’s breakthrough by chronicling self- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Watching Bowie for the only time in what turned out to be his last tour in 2003, I wanted glamour and mystique, Ziggy preserved. Instead here was ordinary bloke Dave, badly dressed in faded jeans and a mismatched top. The beautifully sung, committed performance largely passed me by, as I ached to love the absent, alien Bowie.Brett Morgan’s estate-sanctioned, IMAX-ready, sense-splattering film simulates the fiery trail of Bowie’s earlier, comet impact. Just as his official Stones doc Crossfire Hurricane extracted Jagger’s most revealing band narrative over a torrent of era-defining footage, so Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paris, 16 March 1960 – and cinema ruptured. The first public screening of the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, A Bout de Souffle, breathed life into an arthritic medium, announcing a new world of possibility.Its story, of a French petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who kills a cop and goes on the run with his pretty young lover (Jean Seberg), was deliberately drawn from the Hollywood films Godard and his fellow critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had consumed with monastic devotion in post-war cinématèques. But its execution liberated.In its first few minutes, the smooth, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Crimes of the Future is a nostalgic return to classic Cronenberg, a comforting catalogue of body horror and fleshy biosynthesis, paranoid plots and shadowy cabals. Sharing a title with his 1970 debut, the director is still fascinated by our physical adaptation to future shocks.In his vague, allegorical sci-fi future, humanity’s “insurrectional” evolution has largely eradicated pain and produced surplus organs of uncertain consequence. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and ex-trauma surgeon Caprice (Léa Seydoux, pictured below, right with Mortensen) are performance artists on a posh, illicit Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A starry cast headed by Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell doesn’t quite manage to bring this lavish, light-hearted period pastiche to life, though it looks good – nice cars, lovely costumes, a quasi-Wes Anderson vibe – and there are mild chuckles to be had.Filmed during the pandemic in an empty theatre-land, it’s Bafta-award-winning director Tom George’s film debut and fans of BBC Three’s brilliant mockumentary, This Country, which he directed, may be startled at his new trajectory. This Country’s creator and star, Charlie Cooper, is also on board as a melancholy theatre usher, as is Paul Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Jane Campion’s enigmatic, triple-Oscar-winning film looks as beautiful as it did when it was released almost 30 years ago. Holly Hunter (you can’t help thinking she’s been underused ever since, give or take her performance in Campion’s Top of the Lake) is magnificent as the black-haired Ada, a mysteriously mute Scot who is sold by her father to frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) and joins him as his wife in the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand.Ada brings her daughter and sign-language interpreter, Flora, the marvellous 11-year-old Anna Paquin, with her, as well as the precious Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Before there was cinema, there was story-telling around the fire with those who could spin the best yarns, conjure the most vivid visions, winning the love of their audience. George Miller has been bringing innovative and entrancing stories to the screen ever since his debut with Mad Max in 1979, and has never limited himself to one genre.The Australian director, now in his 70s, has given us not only action heroes in post-apocalyptic landscapes but also a sagacious pig in Babe and dancing penguins in Happy Feet. Along the way, he cast three beautiful actresses as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Michael McDonagh’s acerbic tragedy of manners and morals sees West meets East, in a literal car crash of sloppy behaviour and messy intentions.Alcoholic doctor David and blocked children’s author Jo (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain) are the burnt-out upper-class couple speeding through the Moroccan night, David drunkenly at the wheel, when Berber boy Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) steps into their path. They fatally hit, and run on to the decadent party at the desert home of Richard (Matt Smith). It seems a clean getaway, till Driss’s father Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) arrives at the gates Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere.It seems somehow out of place to express cavils that the tone of this encounter is supremely respectful, that Herzog does not press Gorbachev into commentary on events of history beyond those in which he was immediately involved. Though today’s Russians would hardly agree with Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hailed by Miloš Forman as “the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave”, Czech film director Vojtěch Jasný’s long career began in the early 1950s and spanned five decades. All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci), based on a screenplay originally written by Jasný in 1956, was released in 1968 and won him a Best Director award at Cannes a year later.Alas, following the Soviet invasion in 1968, the film ended up as one of a handful of 1960s Czech features to be “banned forever”, unsurprising given Jasný’s assertion that, “with Countrymen, I showed real life from 1945 to 1968. It was the Read more ...