Film
Sebastian Scotney
The French seaside has been the setting for all kinds of summer holiday capers. We are used to the idea that this is a place where young people set about finding out who they are. At the top of the quality spectrum are Éric Rohmer’s well-observed comedies of manners like Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996). Down at the bottom, there are shockers like Axelle Laffont’s Milf (2018).The trope normally involves a portrayal of a relatively carefree existence. Emilie Aussel has a different idea in mind, however. Her feature debut Our Eternal Summer starts off Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the best scenes in this Brad Pitt starrer takes place in the quiet car of a Japanese bullet train, as two men seek to kill each without leaving their seats or disturbing their fellow passengers. Aside from being amusingly and skilfully executed, the conceit lends the scene a restraint that is sorely missing from the rest of this cartoonishly hyper-active movie. It would be churlish to deny Bullet Train’s goofy charm and expertly-choreographed action set pieces. But it largely depends on Pitt’s engaging central performance to hold one’s interest whenever its chaotically over-egged Read more ...
David Thompson
The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine.Yes, it’s a pleasurable road movie dealing with a bickering family packed into a car and making a trip that will affect all their lives, and they do burst into communal singing from time to time. But the music they enjoy are songs from pre-Revolution Iran, and for all the comic delights en route, the film has a deeper political resonance than most Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their married life going from one volcanic eruption to the next. These self-styled “volcano runners” were not just thrill seekers, but serious volcanologists keen to gain a better understanding of how volcanoes work so as to further science and save lives.Sara Dosa’s documentary about the couple from Alsace, who bonded over their singular obsession, is created mainly from footage shot by Maurice (and colleagues) along with glorious stills by Katia. Over a career lasting 23 years, the couple diligently recorded everything they witnessed and Dosa had access to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bob Rafelson finally exiled himself, unable any longer to countenance the consuming nature of his filmmaking. As director, producer and writer in the Sixties and Seventies, he had helped create both New Hollywood’s fabled moment of auteur freedom and its greatest star, Jack Nicholson, in films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.But he spent his last 20 years simply helping to raise his two children in Aspen, Colorado, “alive but lonely”, he told Esquire. When the magazine visited in 2019, they found him still innately combative, in constant pain from heedless adventures reflected in his Read more ...
mark.kidel
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le deuxième souffle (1966), Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).Watching it again after many years, I was struck by how it continues to feel fresh and original Indeed, still ahead of its time, not least because of Wolfgang Suschitzky’s documentary-style location shooting and intimacy with the action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters during her strange, isolated development from battered girlhood into a fragile young adult dismiss her mockingly as “Marsh Girl”. It’s only the kindly black couple who run the general store in Barkley Cove who take any trouble to get to know her or show any concern for her welfare (pictured below, Sterling Macer Jr as Jumpin' and Michael Hyatt as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directed by the fraternal duo Anthony and Joseph Russo, who have helmed several of the colossally successful Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, The Gray Man ought at least to be entertaining and stuffed with blockbusterish thrills.And it is, darting around the world as it tells its amusing but wildly implausible story of two battling hitmen. The Russo boys would have a panic attack if anyone accused it of being a work of exquisite sensibility and artistic finesse, but there’s no need to worry on that score.Nothing about The Gray Man (based on Mark Greaney’s novel) is original, and it may even Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. His philosophy is that there's no task involving a staff member – or a member of their families – that's too petty or too personal for him be involved in, too. And it's his genius, of course, that ends up solving every problem. He justifies his actions because the buck stops with him: “Your problems become my Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) was in production while Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in August 1968. Predictably, the film was banned by the new Czechoslovak regime and it remained unreleased until 1990, though illicit video copies were circulating for several years before.Like Menzel’s Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains, Larks on a String took inspiration from the writings of Bohumil Hrabal, Menzel and Hrabal’s screenplay here based on a collection of short stories written in the 1950s. Set in the industrial town of Kladno, Hrabal’s characters are dissident members Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Arriving late at a performance… I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote of watching Brando on Broadway in 1946. “I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said, 'Watch this guy!' that I realised he was acting.”Kael was recalling the first, visceral shock of the actor’s capacity to merge with a role, having just watched its climax in Last Tango in Paris (1972), in which he dug agonisingly deep into his raging, flailing masculinity. Brando’s screen debut as paraplegic war veteran Ken Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972).It was his emotional investment which made generations unquestioningly sympathise with the film’s privileged family fallen on hard times – a standby of middle-class children’s literature revived as recently as Mary Poppins Returns.That belated sequel proved you can better a beloved original, and poured Read more ...