Film
Justine Elias
Champion (1949), one of many boxing films of the 1930s and 1940s, made a sculpture – and a star – of Kirk Douglas. In one of the few non-fight scenes, Douglas, as middleweight Midge Kelly, agrees to pose for an artist (Lola Albright), but quickly gets bored.A bruiser in and out of the ring, he’s got his eye on the artist. So he drops his robe, crushes his clay likeness, and moves in, even though she’s his manager’s wife. Midge is always on the make. What he wants, he takes. Women, trainers, managers. And he bails on them like a snake sheds its skin.“I’m not gonna be a ‘Hey, you’ all my life Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There has been no shortage of documentaries about king Beach Boy Brian Wilson, not to mention the 2014 bio-drama Love & Mercy, so the purpose of this new effort by director Brent Wilson (no relation) isn’t altogether clear. Certainly Wilson (the director) leaves no stone unturned in his mission to emphasise once again the ineffable genius of the former symphonist of surf, but surely nobody with an interest in pop history needs any reminding.As such eminent talking heads as Bruce Springsteen, Don Was and Elton John are wheeled out to testify to Brian’s brilliance, a sceptic might detect Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Guillermo del Toro has described Nightmare Alley as “a straight, really dark story”, lacking the supernatural elements in his previous films such as Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. Nonetheless, Nightmare Alley still feels like a spectral visitation from a weird and menacing dimension.Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham (previously filmed in 1947 starring Tyrone Power), it’s the story of ambitious carnival worker Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see in the opening sequence setting fire to what we will learn was his own home in the Midwest. At first he’s a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Memory Box is that rare thing, a glimpse into a lost world from its traumatised inhabitants. Made by the Lebanese artist-filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (a husband and wife team), it’s an intergenerational drama split between Beirut during the Eighties (the height of the Lebanese Civil War) and present day Canada. During the war, over a million people fled the country, including Hadjithomas’s best friend, a teenage girl who moved to Paris.They kept in close touch sending each other notebooks filled with photos, drawings, magazine cuttings and recorded voice messages on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The name of Neville Chamberlain and the term “appeasement” have become indelibly linked, thanks to his efforts to accommodate Adolf Hitler’s bellicose ambitions in the run-up to what became World War Two.This film version of Robert Harris’s novel Munich seeks to draw a more nuanced portrait of the British Prime Minister, putting the case that the agreement Chamberlain signed with Hitler in Munich in September 1938 delayed the outbreak of war long enough to allow Britain and her allies to prepare themselves for hostilities and eventually defeat Germany.It’s a thesis which might be deemed to Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In my teens, I was one of the budding cinephiles who ran the Film Club at my boarding school. Once a month, we’d rent an arthouse movie. The films would be projected on the Saturday night.Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) was a revelation. As we staggered out of the packed hall, still haunted by the unforgettable shot of Death leading those whose fate he'd announced, in silhouette on the crest of a windswept hill, there was a spontaneous wave of elation: the entire audience clamoured to see the film again the next day. This was the first time in my life that I'd ever watched a film Read more ...
David Nice
Most dystopian satires are located in a nightmarish future, but their scripts build on the worst of our world today. Adam McKay's Don’t Look Up is different: this is now, and the notion of a comet hurtling towards the assured destruction of planet Earth is the hub for a heaping-up and jamming-together of how media and government respond to the worst imaginable crisis.Clever, often brilliant, luxuriously but pointedly cast, sprawling – I was never bored but I understand the plea for the shedding of 20 or so minutes – and stylishly filmed. Don’t Look Up doesn’t disappoint in its bid to say many Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play of the same name, writer-director Stephen Karam's screen iteration of his own one-act seems even bleaker in this iteration than it did in my twofold experience of it on stage (including at the Hampstead, with its original New York cast, in autumn 2018). .Those who think American drama too often offers its characters the easy way out won't find that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A Hero, set in the ancient city of Shiraz in southwest Iran, revolves around Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a weak man with gleaming white teeth and a permanent smile. He’s on leave from prison for the weekend, an odd concept in itself, as there are no restrictions to his movements and the whole set-up seems surprisingly lax and polite for what we might expect from an Iranian jail. As soon as he gets out he runs for a bus and misses it, still smiling, which serves as a kind of metaphor for his limp stance in life. His criminality isn't very intriguing, as he's just serving time for owing Read more ...
theartsdesk
Like every other artform, cinema suffered greatly in a year of lockdowns. But despite an ever-changing outlook, theartsdesk still managed to review over 130 films in 2021!Long-awaited blockbusters and no-budget indies fought for screen space big and small, but only a select few achieved five star status. Here are the 2021 releases our critics deemed perfect:The Dig (28 January 2021)This adaptation of John Preston’s novel features Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes and Lily James in a haunting exploration of time and timelessness.Our reviewer Adam Sweeting said: “The Dig really is a story for the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The restrictiveness of conventional gender identities explains the extreme body horror of Titane, in which a pregnant rookie firefighter frequently invoked as Jesus bleeds car oil from her vagina and from the stigmatic splits in her swollen belly. The miracle of Julia Doucournau’s luridly beautiful Palme d’Or-winner is that the memory of the violence puncturing the film's first half recedes as loving tenderness takes hold.Protagonist Alexia (first-time actor Agathe Rousselle magnificently channelling punk snottiness and catwalk hauteur) may be a serial killer who’s been impregnated by a car, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is the first, released amid the final months of Mátyás Rákosi’s de-facto leadership, a period defined by intense industrialisation, militarisation and collectivization. Fábri and his contemporaries witnessed a severe decline in living standards, purges, and the deportation of more than half a million Hungarians to the Soviet Union, where Read more ...