Film
Markie Robson-Scott
“We want you to see a doctor. You’ve changed, and not in a good way,” says Kathy’s underwhelming husband, Tim (Matthew Jure).We don’t know what Kathy (Cathy Naden, making her film debut) was like before, but as things stand she seems to be following her impulses gaily and uninhibitedly. In the first scene, we see her chatting to Nick (Jerry Killick), a laid-back, pony-tailed gardener at the museum where she works as an archaeologist. She admires his vintage BMW. He takes her up on her request to go for a spin; then they have sex in the back seat.This makes her late for a lecture she’s giving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2011, Ferdinand von Schirach’s novel Der Fall Collini (The Collini Case) was published, its narrative of crime and punishment inspired by a law passed in Germany in 1968. Promoted by Dr Eduard Dreher, a former Nazi-era prosecutor who served in the post-1945 West German justice ministry along with many fellow ex-Nazis, this law was in effect an amnesty for murders committed during the Third Reich era. Somehow it was passed almost unnoticed, under the carefully bland title of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offenses. “The law seemed so unimportant it wasn’t even debated in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It has become so hard to find funding for non-fiction films that many documentary makers now feel compelled to sell their stories as racy detective yarns, larded with dramatic scores and sneakily obfuscating narratives. There’s a piece of deception at the heart of Sam Hobkinson’s Misha and the Wolves which in this age of Holocaust denial, is distressingly slippery.The film starts out as a portrait of a little Jewish girl, Misha Defonseca, who was hidden with a Belgian family during WWII. Decades later, living in America she tells her synagogue an incredible, heart-rending story of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The cinema fan in your life is going to thank you for this one. The BFI’s new two-disc Blu-ray version of Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, filmed in India, is absolutely packed with extras: no fewer than six other offerings, including a 90-minute "documentary film-fiction hybrid" by Roberto Rossellini, an hour-long documentary, and even some early 20th century footage from India.There are interviews and essays, including an important and beautifully written one by Satyajit Ray, whose own film-making career was kickstarted by his involvement in the filming of The River. All this fascinating Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Bill Duke’s 1992 thriller Deep Cover receives the Criterion restoration treatment, and certainly the neon noir lighting looks luscious and fresh. It’s a shame the screenplay, the directing, and most of the acting hasn’t stood the test of time. The narrative is more than a little moralistic and obvious right from the start, opening with a flashback to a young boy witnessing his addict father die attempting a liquor store robbery as Christmas looms. The boy grows up to be a troubled Cleveland cop, Russell Stevens (played very well by Laurence Fishburne), who gets recruited by an ambitious Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.Swarms of stripy insects, however, are far from the most severe problems besetting the new hipster residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green luxury lofts. These were formerly a crime-ridden high-rise public housing project, as pictured in the 1992 film, now partly torn down and in the midst of gentrification.“White people built the ghetto, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Budget constraints. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can be a blessing in disguise, forcing creativity from simplicity. That’s exactly what works for The Toll, a dark comedy set in the wild west of these isles: Pembrokeshire.Michael Smiley plays a nameless toll booth operator in the middle of a large coastal wasteland. What the booth is for isn’t clear – there’s plenty of room to drive around it. But there’s a heavy implication that doing so would put you on the wrong side of the mild-mannered operator, and the locals know better than that.There’s a taste of the spaghetti western to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s often the company one keeps that makes a journey worthwhile, not the destination. That’s as true for the five ebullient Fort William schoolgirls making their first trip to Edinburgh in Our Ladies as it is for the film’s audience. These Highland hoydens are so much fun, it’s a pity when our brief time with them ends.Choir members at a Catholic all-girls’ school, they descend on Edinburgh, after some unnecessarily beautiful shots of braes and glens, with high hopes of getting laid and zero interest in winning the singing competition the choir’s been enrolled in by its optimistic organiser Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Nest is a peculiar animal, hard to nail down, parts family drama and social satire, but with a creepy sense of suspense rippling under the surface that threatens to bust the plot wide open. The fact that it’s written and directed by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Southcliffe) makes sense of the unease. But at the film's heart is an old-fashioned marital tussle, between an independent, no-nonsense American woman and her posturing, bullshitting, over-striving English husband, each performed with nuance and gusto by Carrie Coon and Jude Law. You could cut the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Written and directed by Lisa Joy, who masterminded HBO’s Westworld TV series, Reminiscence is a grandiose sci-fi blockbuster that looks great, sounds deafening, but ultimately disappoints because it’s a genre-sampler that can’t find a distinctive voice of its own. A powerful cast, notably the trio of Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson and Thandiwe (formerly Thandie) Newton, do their best, but their hands have been tied by echoes of Casablanca, Waterworld, The Big Sleep, Chinatown and probably many more.Joy is emphatically in the Nolan camp (she’s married to Jonathan, co-creator of Westworld and Read more ...
mark.kidel
The shadow of the Holocaust and the horror of the camps haunts literature and the cinema: from The Reader to The Night Porter, from Schindler’s List to Son of Saul. For some, the subject was beyond authentic representation – and perhaps only a poetic masterpiece such as Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, with its sombre and recurring images could come close to making the violence and tragedy in some way true.Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, which tells the story of a camp survivor whose wife and children were murdered by the Nazis, manages the challenge through the very intense performance of the lead Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s always a bit worrying when distributors choose to open a film in August at the best of times, but after 18 months of covid playing havoc with release schedules, the backlog of titles has to be dealt with somehow. The Courier is one such movie, seeping out now in selected art house cinemas: if it doesn’t set the box office on fire, the distributors can blame the sunshine, not the drabness of the movie itself. This tale of Cold War skulduggery, based on a true story, has been waiting for a UK release since before 2020 and provoked mixed reviews on its American release in March. Read more ...