satire
Laura de Lisle
“The crocus of hope is, er, poking through the frost.” When he uttered that dodgy metaphor back in February, Boris Johnson probably didn’t predict that it would become the opening number of the third edition of Living Newspaper, the Royal Court’s anarchic, hyper-current series of new writing. Then again, there’s little BoJo does that the Living Newspaper writers can’t tear to pieces accompanied by a jazzy saxophone riff. There’s a new group of writers this time, providing short scenes stitched together into one big "newspaper", all set in different spaces within the Royal Court building Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. Having started her career with films about children (Water Lilies, Tomboy), before moving to teenagers (Girlhood) and then adults (Portrait), Sciamma now takes on three generations at once – a girl, her mother and grandmother – to consider the threads of memory, personality and time that connect them. Her approach is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of brevity, we’ll call Loony Porn.The film has not only been made during the pandemic but fulsomely features the life of a city outdoors – namely Bucharest – as its citizens routinely engaged in social distancing, face covering and the rest. Accompanied by a plot that touches on parenting, the worse aspects of social media and cancel culture, the result Read more ...
India Lewis
This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour, has written a modern-day odyssey, with a return that is ambiguously hopeful. Grey Bees follows a year in the life of Sergey Sergeyich, a retired and lonely beekeeper, keeping the fire burning with his sole neighbour, Pashka, in Little Starhorodivka, a village that sits uneasily inbetween two sides of an entrenched war. The first third of the book concerns Sergeyich's life in the village, before he loads up his ancient Lada (complete with Soviet numberplates) with provisions and beehives and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Every cliché about Hollywood is true,” director Bernard Rose remarked in 2018, at the screening Q&A of the restored version of his 1999 Ivansxtc that appears as an extra on this Arrow release – and, post-#MeToo, the film’s satire of that milieu and all its associated excesses feels as savage as ever. Its story of a talent agent felled at the height of his career by rapidly progressing cancer offered a corrosive view of the studio system seen very much from the inside, the trajectory of its protagonist seen by many at the time to have mirrored the burnt-out self-destruction of feted CAA Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already have a tinge of sepia about them. Set in a bustling east Berlin, this sharply plotted tale of start-up bliss and blunder, then bliss again, sees characters commuting on public transport, working in an office, attending first-thing-in-the-morning “hype sessions” to run-of-the-mill meetings, bouncing in and out of bar-cafes, going on dates in restaurants, jetsetting on same-day return flights, and schmoozing potential clients and buyers at soirees buoyed by champagne, canapes (the least “safe Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An endearing cast does what it can to keep Get Duked! aloft until writer-director Ninian Doff's movie sinks under the weight of too many wearisome shifts in tone. A coming-of-age film that is alternately silly and sentimental while wanting at times to be scary as well, the result leaves no doubt as to the talents of its gifted young cast. Rather more debatable is music video alum Doff's control over material that lurches all over the map, buoying up the audience on the back of some fresh-faced leads before devolving into absurdity by the final reel. The setting suggests an odd amalgam of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The spoof “rockumentary” always sounds like a great idea, but it’s hard to pull off. Largely this is because rock stars are so divorced from reality that an element of self-parody is already built in, albeit unwittingly (“everybody’s so different, I haven’t changed” as Joe Walsh deadpanned in "Life's Been Good"). This Is Spinal Tap (the Rosetta Stone of the genre) worked because it didn’t try to invent its material so much as amass a load of real-life examples and compress them into 82 minutes.At least writer/director Rhy Thomas has some credibility in this area, having masterminded the droll Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Maria Reva’s humorously gloomy debut collection, centring on the inhabitants of a block of stuffy apartments in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Ukraine, starts, predictably enough, with Lenin. Instead of an austere symbol of ideology, he’s a statue who “squinted into the smoggy distance. Winter’s first snowflakes settled on its shoulders like dandruff.” A clumsy figure, whimsically at one with the amplified dreariness around him, he fits comfortably within the brisk, deadpan comedy of the stories that follow. By the end of the book, he’s been reduced to “a concrete pedestal”. “Only his feet remain Read more ...
Owen Richards
Horror has always been a good vehicle for satire, from John Carpenter’s They Live to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Some metaphors opt for the subtle precision of a surgical knife, and others the hit you over the head. The Platform on Netflix is the latter, a brutal, blunt and effective sledgehammer.The concept is straight from a high school philosophy allegory. A vertical prison, with two cellmates per level. At the very top, a lavish feast is prepared on a platform every day. It passes through every level, inmates desperately eating their fill before it lowers down. The further down you are, the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Steve Coogan’s long partnership with director Michael Winterbottom is probably best known for The Trip and its spin-offs, involving Coogan’s comic culinary excursions alongside Rob Brydon. But for its serious undercurrents and disreputable subject matter, their new film is more akin to The Look of Love, in which Coogan played the sleazy Soho entrepreneur Paul Raymond. Here he is again, playing a real heel. This time, their story doesn’t’ start in sex clubs, but clothes shops. Coogan is Sir Richard McCreadie, aka “Greedy McCreadie”, public school drop-out turned Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With the Oscars approaching, one film building momentum in the fight for best picture – and whose victory would delight all but the most blinkered – is the Korean Bong Joon Ho’s deliriously dark and entertaining black comedy, Parasite. It remains an outsider, given that no foreign language film has ever won the main prize. But if Bong breaks that barrier, it will be no fluke. Parasite’s theme, the gulf between rich and poor, resonates far and wide; its delivery – mixing social satire, twisty plotting and Hitchcockian tension – a masterclass in serious-minded but accessible mainstream Read more ...