directors
Adam Sweeting
Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper has previously directed A Star Is Born and Maestro, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as this. It’s a story of New Yorkers in the throes of mid-life crises, as Alex Novak (Will Arnett) separates from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) and finds himself floating in unfamiliar new waters. Their divorce also has a perverse knock-on effect on the lives of their close friends, Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), who both start suffering from copycat syndrome.The joy of the piece (written by Cooper, Arnett and Mark Chappell and loosely based on the life of Read more ...
James Saynor
Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.These two sides to his movie career seem strangely at odds, for many of the Young Turk directors his Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival heroically fostered were unlikely to want to cast him in many of their films. Square-jawed, blue-eyed and bronze-haired, with an impossible-to-resist grin and a limited Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There’s a jolt or a surprise in almost every shot in Andrea Arnold’s Bird – her most impacted and energised depiction of underclass life yet. Photographed by Robbie Ryan, it’s a visual tour de force, one of the most exhilarating British films of 2024, but the affecting story it tells is undermined by its fleeting embrace of magical realism and the climactic swoop of a deus ex machina.Despite these caveats, Arnold remains British cinema’s most trenchant and influential portrayer of neglected, endangered girls and young women living in brutal or inhospitable environments. Claire Oakley’s Make Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich, deepening milieu. Director Wes Ball again offers serious sf, just as much as Dune, considering the consequences of another species’ dominance, and outraged humanity’s resistance.We are unspecified centuries after Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with Caesar’s reign now a font of vaguely remembered ape faith. Human civilisation – and its weaponry – has fallen away, leaving a green world, with mysterious skyscraper skylines sheathed in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin wrote,"So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP."That might be the only point on which he and Joan Littlewood, a fellow poet, might agree, because she caught the zeitgeist and was doing iconoclastic work of her own in Stratford (emphatically not "upon Avon") with her revolutionary musical Oh What A Lovely War. Though it feels now to be something of an artefact in theatre’s archaeology, it has not lost its sting nor its Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
A brief warning to readers: while effort is made to avoid spoilers, I would advise anyone who has somehow missed the massive amount of online speculation about the film’s plot to not read on. See the film first, and please come back. Right… on to business. In No Way Home Tom Holland makes his third outing as Spider-Man with returning director Jon Watts at the helm. In the film’s opening credits, we are reminded that Peter Parker’s identity has been exposed as Spider-Man and he has been framed for a crime by the FX wizard Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal). Struggling to come to terms with his Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Remembering the months of lockdown, I can’t be the only person to thrill to this play’s opening lines, “When shall we three meet again?”, a phrase evocative enough to be borrowed as the first line of this year’s Wolf Alice album, Blue Weekend. Luckily, I didn’t have to brave thunder, lightning or indeed rain to see Oscar-nominated screen star Saoirse Ronan make her UK stage debut, opposite James McArdle, in this production of my favourite Scottish tragedy, directed by the equally award-laden Yaël Farber. But then the Almeida theatre, led by Rupert Goold, is a magnet for stars.It has to be Read more ...
Owen Richards
We’ve all experienced the “fast food film” – enjoyable while we watch it, but realise afterwards it was an empty thrill with little nutritional value. Much rarer is the film that can only be truly appreciated once the credits roll. Black Bear, with its segmented presentation and recurring themes, is one such film. Risky, baffling, and more than the sum of its parts.Aubrey Plaza stars as Alison, a director staying at the rural house of artsy couple Blair and Gabe (Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott). She’s acerbic, ironic, and an agitator in this combustible household. Or is Plaza in fact Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film certainly suggest it was.The film follows Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke as Ruben and Lou, band members and lovers living the ideal rock'n'roll lifestyle. But when Ruben starts to suffer major hearing loss, it's clear their co-dependent relationship is built on shaky foundations. To avoid falling back into addiction, Ruben must isolate himself in an AA Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo, taken by Malcolm X would make the moment iconic, marking a shift away from the horrors of Jim Crow America to the passing of the Civil Rights Act. The events of that evening became the basis of Kemp Powers' 2013 play, and now form the directorial debut for Oscar-winning actress Regina King, who most recently played Sister Night in HBO’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
It all started so promisingly. Parasite's triumph at the Oscars was a resounding response to 2019's saccharine and problematic Green Book. Art house was in and here to stay. And in some ways, this came to pass - with cinemas caught in a cycle of opening and closing, the blockbusters were nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's been the indies and the streamers keeping us entertained through these days of isolation.This year's Best Of selection reflects the strange and diverse release calendar of 2020. Film has proved to be resilient, and a sparser schedule allowed for some hidden gems to shine Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. This adaptation of Wilson’s play is the second in a ten-part cycle that chronicles the Black experience throughout the course of the 20th century. It’s produced by Denzel Washington, who himself starred in Fences, another Wilson play, back in 2016. This chapter focuses on the life of Ma Read more ...