Film
Veronica Lee
Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out?Barney Douglas's film – essentially a long-form interview with John McEnroe, interspersed with generous archive footage, contributions from family and friends including Billie Jean King, home movies and moody shots of the player-turned-commentator walking the streets of Douglaston in Queens, the New York neighbourhood Read more ...
mark.kidel
Pickpocket regularly makes it into the list of best films of all times. It is a film-maker’s film, more of an essay on the art of cinema and a discourse on crime than a thriller. Much French art house cinema is characterised by serious intent and intellectual rigour, and Bresson may be, more than any other auteur, the pioneer of a cinema in which reflection and thought play as much of a part as the display of narrative or emotional excitement.Michel, played by the non-professional Martin LaSalle, is the thief who learns the tricks of his trade from a gang of professionals, and plays through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-eight films and 19 proliferating TV series in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming wearisome, testing fans’ faith with grimly effortful new entries, and choking other sorts of film into the margins, like knotweed. But like the mid-20th century Western, superheroes are also a commercial template for anyone to tell any sort of story. When Taika Waititi’s dry satirist’s voice let rip on Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he combined all his and the genre’s wild virtues.And now, washing away the grim taste of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, here he goes again. With Odin dead and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May.Martin Bryant, aged 28, killed 35 people and wounded 23 in the historic site of Port Arthur (he’s now serving concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole). At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in history. No longer, of course. And at the end the film reveals that although Australia acted fast to change its gun laws, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Director Alice Diop read an article by Pierre Bergounioux in which he described how he began writing to draw attention to his overlooked neck of the woods – Correze, in central France. It was a lightbulb moment for her: “My approach as a film-maker suddenly became clear to me, I realised I’d been making films about the suburbs in an obsessive way for the past 15 years… to conserve the existence of ordinary lives, which would have disappeared without trace if I hadn’t filmed them.”We is a celebration of some of those ordinary lives – people who live alongside the RER railway line to and from Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a sharp observation, delivered in Alan Bennett’s soft tones, that sums up the reputation of the painter Eric Ravilious: “Because his paintings are so accessible, I don’t think he’s thought to be a great artist. It’s because of his charm. He’s so easy to like and things have to be hard, if they’re not hard, then they’re not great." Veteran arts documentary director Margy Kinmonth makes an excellent argument for elevating the status of watercolourist and etcher Eric Ravilious in this lovingly crafted biographical film. Her account begins with Ravilious’ dramatic end; an official war Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Strictly Ballroom aside, I’ve never been entirely persuaded by Baz Luhrmann. Once you rip open the plush packaging of his films, you often just find satin and tissue paper inside. Elvis isn’t his worst movie (they can’t take that accolade away from Moulin Rouge!) but it isn’t the monumental ode to a great American legend that one hoped it might have been.Hats off to Luhrmann’s leading man Austin Butler, at least, who makes a heroic stab at stepping into Elvis’s blue suede shoes and Las Vegas jumpsuits. He doesn’t really resemble the King, but with help from lighting, makeup and some jittery, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
High culture...low life. Emmanuel Courcol’s film The Big Hit (Un Triomphe in France) is a 105-minute experiment in what might possibly go right – and at the same time what could at any moment go spectacularly wrong – when a group of prison inmates are let out of jail to perform Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.It is well-scripted (by director Courcol and two associates), well-plotted, and has strong central performances. When the prisoners first meet the main protagonist, Étienne Carboni (played by Kad Merad), they spot immediately, from the very first sight of his shoes, that although Read more ...
Nick Hasted
His car skids through an LA stoplight, then Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) enters his insurance office in the small hours, taking a lift as if to the scaffold, coat hanging like a cloak, a dark stain on his shoulder. From his upstairs office, the desks below look like a hellish pit, the lamps insectile. Even with the light on, his face stays eaten by shadows at first. Fumbling for a cigarette, he turns on a voice recorder to confess. “Yes, I killed him. For money. And for a woman. I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, ain’t it?”Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck, Read more ...
mark.kidel
The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962) established François Truffaut as an outstanding and original director. His next film, The Soft Skin (La peau douce) from 1964, was not in the same league.Although it displays many of his story-telling skills, not least a gift for suspense, the film feels dated, the characters are not quite as interesting as in his earlier hits, and the plot – a middle-aged married man has an affair with an air hostess, and his worn-out marriage falls apart – is a little formulaic. It is by no means a bad film, but it is certainly not among Truffaut’s best.The two Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The film title Pleasure begs the question, whose pleasure? Since first-time feature director Ninja Thyberg’s cautionary drama depicts the journey of a newcomer intent on becoming the Los Angeles adult film business's top female performer, the pleasure self-evidently isn’t hers, but that taken by the hordes of men who’ll watch her being systematically degraded on Pornhub and its ilk. Doubtless some women porn stars enjoy their work. Women are increasingly vocal about enjoying porn, and there are, of course, adult films that prioritise female sensuality and satiety. But Pleasure’s milieu Read more ...