Film
Robert Beale
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again. Manchester Collective, true to their pioneering and resourceful nature, went one step further. They made films, in collaboration with others, whose viewing could happen in a venue as a kind of event in itself. The result is Dark Days, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is an irony in the fact that the most celebrated of auteurs to emerge during Hong Kong’s "Second Wave" of directors in the 1980s did not originate from within the bounds of the administrative region. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai was the son of a sailor and a housewife. It was only on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, as Mao Zedong sought to strengthen his grip on Chinese society, that Wong's parents took the bold decision to emigrate to British-ruled Hong Kong.For Wong, the journey was a success. Less so, however, for his two older siblings, whom Wong would not see for a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fourteen months after the Manhattan premiere of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place Part II – and three years after his taut, spare original spawned the most suspenseful sci-fi horror franchise of recent times – the movie is setting post-pandemic box office records. Not unexpectedly, it finds the reduced Abbott family still in desperate survival mode in decimated upstate New York.Forced to abandon their farm for hopefully safer waters, newly widowed Evelyn (Emily Blunt), her deaf 17-year-old daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds, who herself is deaf), and her panicky adolescent Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless) and writer Cameron Crowe (who later wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous). Rolling Stone journalist Crowe was 22 and went undercover, impersonating a student at a notoriously wild high school in California to write about kids taking drugs, partying, and having sex. It’s hard to imagine journalism’s codes of practice allowing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough performance as a crack addict plumbing new depths to feed his habit. But other aspects haven’t fared so well, primarily the script’s sexual politics and the casting of Wesley Snipes as the (anti) romantic male lead.Racial politics are the overt subject of Jungle Fever, a cautionary tale of a black man and a white woman having an affair. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Seventeen years after Ben Whishaw shot to attention playing Hamlet, this terrific actor is again playing someone "mad-north-northwest". Marking TV director Aneil Karia's feature film debut, Surge casts Whishaw as a jittery wreck called Joseph, whose psychic decline is tracked across 100 largely wordless minutes that nonetheless communicate a mounting dread. Possessed of a manic laugh that puts one in mind of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, Joseph exists at sorrowful odds with himself, and Whishaw pulls you toward the demons of a man from whom you'd distance yourself in real life. When first Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Kelly Reichardt is one of America’s most distinctive directors, whose meticulously detailed, character and place-driven dramas have a lowkey vibe that belies their impact. Not many directors could make a yarn about a couple of baking entrepreneurs whose only crime is to milk someone else’s cow, which is as gripping, moving, and ceaselessly fascinating as this. First Cow returns Reichardt to the frontier milieu of her Meek’s Cutoff in 2010. That film involved Old West settlers who lose their way on the Oregon Trail; her protagonists here have reached a destination of sorts Read more ...
Graham Fuller
American filmmaker Ira Sachs excels at crafting throughtful relationship dramas in which middle-class characters confronted with crises or unanticipated realisations gain valuable emotional knowledge. His best works – Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Keep the Lights On (2012), and Little Men (2016) – demonstrate an evenness and maturity rare in the rough and tumble of indie cinema. Sadly, Sach’s new film Frankie pales beside its predecessors, despite the presence of Isabelle Huppert and Brendan Gleeson and a postcard-perfect Portuguese Riviera backdrop.Conceived as a light meditation on mortality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is Cruella the escapist blockbuster the Covid-blighted world has been waiting for? Well, it’s a feast for the eyes but 20 minutes too long, and for an origin story of the despicable Cruella De Vil of The Hundred and One Dalmations fame, it lacks the killer instinct when it comes to the crunch. At the end of the day, Cruella may have some serious mother issues, but she isn’t really cruel.Besides, we’ve had a consciousness-revolution about animal welfare since 1956, when Dodie Smith published her original Hundred and One Dalmatians novel. Smith’s Cruella was the acme of heartlessness, a woman Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Jean-Luc Godard’s film-making career, a restless quest for a cinema that questions the medium as well as its place in the social and political context, is both astonishingly prolific and unique. Rarely drawing directly on autobiographical themes, sometimes refusing to be credited as the sole director, he nevertheless remains the most personally driven of all the stars of the French New Wave. His 1966 Masculin Féminin is a kind of hologram of the thematic obsessions and stylistic tropes that characterise many of his best-known films.Although very loosely inspired by two Maupassant short Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This pallid chick flick limps out on release having changed its title since its Berlinale 2020 debut; in the US it's known as My Salinger Year, but perhaps market research in Blighty decreed that name-checking the author of The Catcher in the Rye wouldn't play as well here. Based on novelist Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 auto-fiction, it’s an account of the period she spent working for a legendary literary agent in Manhattan in the mid-90s. While Rakoff’s book has some appeal for readers interested in publishing or nostalgic for accounts of ambitious young graduates trying to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With a track record which includes both Sicario movies, Hell or High Water and Wind River, Taylor Sheridan packs some muscle in the action-thriller department, though Those Who Wish Me Dead can’t match those previous highlights. Nonetheless, it’s the kind of great-outdoors adventure flick featuring some bankable names that’s been largely AWOL during the pandemic hiatus, which could prove tempting to movie-goers. It’s adapted from Michael Koryta’s novel by Sheridan and Charles Leavitt, and Sheridan directs with pragmatic efficiency.Having said that, Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be everybody’s first Read more ...