politics
Tom Birchenough
Latin America has learnt from harsh experience just what the legacy of dictatorship involves, when the structure itself may have been dismantled but the psychology that it engendered remains. It’s a subject that has been tackled by many of the continent’s filmmakers, prime among them perhaps Pablo Larrain in Chile, for whom such explorations have themselves become part of the slow process of moving on from that past.The Clan has Argentina's Pablo Trapero dramatising a real-life story from the 1980s that is as chilling as they come, while the manner in which he approaches it only underlines Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.Mokhnenko’s charisma is at the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future ghost, a man mutely begging to be shriven. The last person he’d choose for such confession, though, would surely be George Galloway, whose presence as presenter may handicap this film’s reception. If any politician is even more toxic than Blair, it’s Gorgeous George. Still, this crowd-funded documentary is a lively, well-researched investigation Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Did we really need to go through this all over again? The referendum campaign left roughly half the nation levitating on cloud nine, and roughly the other half feeling amputated. We all know what happened, but in this hour-long post-mortem Laura Kuenssberg went looking under rocks for extra titbits and morsels that could explain from the inside of the two campaigns how Britain voted for the trapdoor/sunlit upland marked Exit.The news is that there isn’t much news to report. Kuenssberg’s scoops have already been trailed in the prints: Clegg outing Gove as the source of The Sun’s non-story Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Ukraine embroiled in conflict and a currency crisis the Odessa International Film Festival does not have the budget to bring in big stars. In any case, most of those pampered A-listers would have been nervous to go to what they or their advisers would have assumed to be a conflict zone. One really has to to admire the Festival’s volunteer-fuelled enthusiasm - it may be the underdog of international film fests, but it delivers an enlightening, elegantly organised and hugely enjoyable event. The Brit element was out in relative force this year. The winner of the festival’s main prize Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What happened was this. I found my way, not without difficulty, to the Barry Memo Arts Centre, got my ticket, had a chat with the librettist, stopped to order an interval drink, then turned round to discover that the entire audience had disappeared, as if eliminated by a Star Wars de-atomiser, or whatever those things are called. Two or three of us ran outside, looked this way and that, and after a few panic-stricken minutes tracked down the audience, who had gone right round the building in a crocodile and re-entered it by a door on the far side.Yes, you’ve guessed it. It was a “promenade” Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Weiner is the story of a rapid ride from comeback to meltdown. It’s an enthralling journey to witness, even if you sometimes feel like averting your eyes. What can be more inexorable than a political life – not to mention a private one – imploding on screen in a documentary where the subject has promised full access to the filmmakers, and sticks to that pledge regardless?The story of Anthony Weiner’s 2013 bid to become mayor of New York made front page news in America. He was clearly an extremely articulate and dynamic Democrat political operator, but that wasn’t the main issue. What made his Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, who called the referendum in an attempt to secure an election victory, while Brexit has been spearheaded by a shambolic, and mildly Europhile, thatched homunculus, who simply wants the other guy’s job. We are, essentially, collateral damage in a spectacularly damaging career move.But with the shouting is over, it’s time for the really important Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Never in the field of human voting has so much been demanded of so many by so few... Triggered by a moment of prime ministerial hubris and made reality by a Tory leadership bid and the relentless UKIP catcalls, the referendum is putting control of our EU membership into the hands of a British public who are heavy on emotion, but light on facts.Not that this is surprising. When predicting the future, points tend to be moot, and this has meant that both campaigns have been based largely on fear and self-interest. The one thing that has shone through so far is a horrible disregard for the Read more ...