Film
John Carvill
Andrew Sarris, doyen of auteurist film critics, dubbed A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”. Wild over-praise, or sly, back-handed compliment?"Jukebox musical" connotes the sort of "exploitation film" Elvis churned out. Corporate suits with Dollar sign eyes may have wanted to exploit The Beatles, but the band were too savvy. Despite the fact that pop phenomena tended to fizzle out fast, meaning their time in the spotlight might be limited, The Beatles had refused several film offers before A Hard Day’s Night, holding out for something real, something, in John Lennon’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. She’s so querulous and demanding that whether she gets up and walks at the end matters less to the viewer than her frustrated caregiver daughter’s ability to free herself from Mum’s mind-forged manacles. The world belongs to the young, after all.Former librarian Rose (Fiona Read more ...
James Saynor
“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.As far back as the cheap and nasty Shivers, Cronenberg molested the line between the quick and the dead, pioneering horror motifs like inflamed-penis parasites bursting out of stomachs and plugholes and into people’s orifices. His films became famous for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with pizzazz by Steven Spielberg, it was ground-breaking (and indeed ground-shaking) enough to earn admission to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry on account of being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.Six more Jurassic-themed movies followed in its wake (with Spielberg only directing 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but none of them managed to match the impact of the original. Indeed, most of them needn’t have bothered Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb flew to Sudan after the overthrow of hated dictator Omar al-Bashir, hoping to chronicle the dream of an Arab country shaken up by a feminist revolution. The young pro-democracy activists, mostly women, she met at a sit-in protest outside army headquarters in Khartoum became the focus of Sudan, Remember Us, which she filmed over the next four years.However, this sad and lyrical movie didn’t turn out quite the way she’d imagined. The revolution was hijacked by a violent military crackdown and civil war that have now left Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.His Dogme 95-influenced Grill Point (2002), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin, follows two couples in crisis. Cloud 9 (2008) and Stopped on Track (2011), both Cannes prize-winners, addressed sex in old age and dying respectively. Gundermann (2018) is a biopic of the East German singer-songwriter and Stasi informant Gerhard Gundermann. The real-life Guantánamo drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush (2022) depicts the eponymous Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of the character comedian Graham Fellows will possibly turn up for this British film starring the man who created the punk parody single “Jilted John” and Sheffield’s finest, the car-coated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. But they may leave disappointed.The action is set in one of the backwaters of rural Britain getting a lot of attention these days; on paper the plot is serviceable. Chicken empire heir Lee Matthews (Ramy Ben Fredj, pictured below, left with Ethaniel Davy) skids on black ice and wipes out a Nativity scene outside his local church but gets the blame pinned on his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As producer Jerry Bruckheimer cautioned a preview audience, “Remember, this is not a documentary. It’s a movie.” Bruckheimer teamed up with director Joseph Kosinski to make Brad Pitt’s Formula One movie, the same duo who masterminded Top Gun: Maverick. Both films share a kind of dazzling hyper-reality which dares you to try to deny it. You might think “that’s ridiculous, that could never happen,” to which the filmmakers might reply “yes it could, because we just did it.”The F1 paddock and pitlane must have been getting pretty crowded during the making of F1 over the last couple of seasons, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Composer Bernard Hughes first met director Richard Bracewell when working on the film Bill, a 2015 Horrible Histories take on the life of Shakespeare for which he provided some of the score. The pair were keen to collaborate again but the pandemic put paid to their plans. The new black comedy Chicken Town sees the pair reunited.GRAHAM RICKSON: This is a film made on a small budget. How do the economics of a production affect how you work?BERNARD HUGHES: I discussed the brief with Richard from the very start, and there were two big considerations. Namely “what do you want it to sound like?” Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 23 years since 28 Days Later and especially those since Danny Boyle’s soulful encapsulation of Britain’s best spirit at the 2012 Olympics have offered rich material for a franchise about deserted cities, rampaging viruses, hard quarantines and an insular, afraid country hacked adrift from Europe.28 Years Later takes this chance with punk chutzpah, right from a pumped-up prologue in which children watch Teletubbies to mask the sound of the adult world being eaten by Rage virus-infected zombies, only to be devoured too in a frenzy of close-up Anthony Dod Mantle camerawork, vintage digital Read more ...
James Saynor
Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the head of his teenage cousin after the cousin is executed by jihadists. But see the film you really should.In an opening 10 minutes of pre-title exuberance, goat-herders Achraf (Ali Helali) and Nizar (Yassine Samouni) are seen fooling about, looking for water, helping a lost baby goat and sunbathing in mountains above the plains where they live, bouncing among canyons sculpted in umpteen shades of tan and salmon, and speckled with extremists.Like wolves descending Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A look at Darling on its 60th anniversary offers a sobering reality check on the "Swinging Sixties", a reminder of the fallacy of the decade’s gaiety and supposed liberation, especially for women. This attractive 4K restoration reveals the film to be a very complicated animal indeed – both in its own time and through the prism of today’s very different political correctness and gender ethics. While John Schlesinger’s "classic" plays like a scathing satire of the period, I’m not convinced that this was entirely intentional at the time, which of course makes it even more Read more ...