Film
Graham Fuller
Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film. Though its protagonist, Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for the United Biscuits Network, drives from London to Bristol in his two-tone Rover to investigate why his brother has killed himself, his journey extends beyond his half-hearted sleuthing and carries him into as many liminal spaces in his psyche as the real ones in which he lingers during his journey. Unfolding over a few wintry days centred on Saturday, 10 March 1979, Radio On is often painted as bleak, Read more ...
Tom Baily
Success for the Belgian-Dutch crime series Undercover has led Netflix to produce an origin story for the show’s drug lord character Ferry Bouman (Frank Lammers). While this may be a dream come true for a portion of the show’s diehard fans, this formulaic movie is stalling, predictable and riddled with every gangster cliché in the book.Before he made it big, Ferry Bouman was the right hand man to one of Amsterdam’s senior drug kings Ralph Brink. After their gang is brutally attacked and Ralph’s son is killed, Ferry is sent on a revenge mission. He finds himself in a mobile camping community Read more ...
mark.kidel
Martin Ritt’s 1965 classy screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an antidote to the full-colour hi-jinx of the Bond franchise that ruled over the spy movie genre in the 1960s. By the time Paul Dehn, an ex-spook himself, and the screenwriter of Goldfinger (1964), took over as the main scriptwriter for the film, the public was ready for something a good deal less glamorous, and a hero who was a serial failure rather than a seductive superman.This is perhaps one of Richard Burton’s greatest moments in film – as the desperate and melancholy agent Alec Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Darkest Hour may have been director Joe Wright’s finest hour, but we can say for certain that, despite its impressive cast, The Woman in the Window isn’t. Concocted from A J Finn’s titular novel with a screenplay by Tracy Letts, it’s a perplexingly derivative thriller which gives leading lady Amy Adams precious little on which to unleash her considerable talents. Predicting the outcome is merely a matter of totting up which scenario scores highest on the PlayItAgainSam-ometer.Adams plays child psychologist Dr Anna Fox, who’s separated from her husband and child and lives in a cavernous Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s not until the final moments of End of Sentence that Frank (John Hawkes) lets himself laugh – he’s swimming in the icy waters of an Irish lake - and what a relief it is to hear. Icelandic director Elfar Adalsteins’s debut feature (Sailcloth, a wordless short starring John Hurt, won several awards in 2011) is a study in family shame, masculinity and keeping things inside.In this father and son road movie, set in the US and Ireland with a script by Michael Armbruster (Beautiful Boy), we slowly find out why Frank is so buttoned-up – he never takes his shirt off, not even in bed. His Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views provide a useful guide as to where the silver-haired vote stands.And on first sight, this “Disneyland for retirees” may seem like Nirvana, especially as one of the first people featured in Lance Oppenheim's quietly poetic and touching film says: “You come here to live, not to die” and another posits: “It's like going to college. Everybody can be who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the choppy depths under the surface calm of suburban Cold War America, its terrors in the night.Venturing beyond the obvious classics, Columbia Noir #3 shows the range and intensity of Hollywood’s response to the post-war malaise. Often blighted by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-communist witch-hunts, and increasingly shot in real Read more ...
Tom Baily
Watching Milestone, a new Netflix original directed by Ivan Ayr, I was reminded of the films of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This story about an aging truck driver facing redundancy whilst grieving for his wife attempts the still mood and loneliness that Kiarostami favoured in his quiet epics. Milestone borrows a lot from existing filmmakers – no problem in itself – but does Ayr offer a unique style? Is Milestone just another Netflix original that isn’t really all that original?Suvinder Vicky plays Ghalib, the withdrawn driver (the echoes to Ramin Bahrani’s films are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature. Part coming-of-age drama, part grisly horror, the film centres on young Justine (Garance Marillier), a fresher at the remote veterinary college once attended by her parents and where her sister Alexia is already a student.The campus is a bleak, brutalist outpost, and Justine’s first days there are dominated by a series of barbaric initiation ceremonies, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Enid Bagnold’s 1955 English play The Chalk Garden, a Broadway hit before it opened in the West End, is usually described as a comedy because of Bagnold’s acerbic dialogue and droll appreciation of intricate employer-servant dynamics. If most of the wit was polished out of the 1964 version, directed by Ronald Neame and scored by Malcolm Arnold in a high-blown romantic style, that only served to emphasize the psychological complexity of the relationships between its three strong women characters. No one could accuse Neame's film of modishness. An Anglo-American melodrama produced by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“The only child I’ve ever had is you,” the artist’s wife (Lena Olin), spits at the artist, her considerably older husband (Bruce Dern), who retorts, “That was your goddamn choice so don’t blame it on me.”Although the setting – a wintery East Hampton – is gorgeous, this portrait of Richard Smythson, a celebrated abstract artist just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and his equally talented wife Claire, who gave up her own painting career in favour of his, never veers far from a well worn path.It doesn’t bear comparison with Nebraska, where Bruce Dern played another senile old chap so magnificently Read more ...