Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock.
That the film has also soared at the box office is heartening news in itself: a reminder that largescale audiences do exist for a portrait of a time when black lives didn't particularly matter, as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Johnson each discovered in different ways. First encountered on a Virginia road where the three women are tending to a broken-down car only to be approached by a white police officer who brings with him the whiff of fear, Melfi alongside Allison Schroeder's screenplay make implicit the irony of a country devoted to the pursuit of findings in space when so much needs doing here on planet earth. (The movie is based on Margot Lee Shetterly's bestseller of the same title.)
Not that our fearless and feisty trio are going to let colour barriers and prejudice – not to mention ages-old misogyny – stand in their way. Glimpsed at the start as a six-year-old whiz with numbers whose prowess simply will not be contained, Katherine (Taraji P Henson) is re-encountered as an adult handpicked to join what had been a men's-only flight research team. She immediately faces challenges that range from making coffee from a "colored" pot to sprinting to hell and back in order to find a toilet she can use. Her loo breaks are played for physical comedy shot through inevitably with pathos at the absurd injustice of it all, and the wonderful Henson does both parts of that equation proud, Pharrell Williams's aptly titled "Runnin'" providing a musical cue. 
While Katherine makes herself increasingly crucial to an initially hostile set of colleagues – the shining exception being her gum-chewing boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner on fine form, pictured above to the left of Henson) – Dorothy (Octavia Spencer, the lone Oscar nominee of the three women) awaits promotion to the rank of supervisor of a room of adroit black mathematicians who must not be left to languish. Her white superior is played by a tight-lipped Kirsten Dunst, who is the equivalent in Dorothy's worklife of the sneering Jim Parsons, one of Harrison's stable and a colleague who all but hisses steam every time Katherine enters his midst. That leaves Mary (the radiant Jonelle Monáe, concurrently also on view in Moonlight), whose own advancement as NASA's first female black engineer depends upon her being able to attend a local, whites-only school. Exuding a whiplash authority with every glance, Monáe projects Mary's intelligence informed at every turn by street smarts.
The women's domestic lives get a look-in now and again, with Moonlight Oscar hopeful Mahershala Ali invaluably on hand as the military man who is there in body and soul for the brainiac that is Katherine. But it's the life of the mind that exists to be celebrated here, as the women ascend in varying ways into career-related orbit, catching the attention of no less a figure than John Glenn (Glen Powell, playing a part amplified in resonance by Glenn's death the same month as the film's American release).
One might wish, I suppose, for filmmaking that itself possessed something of the take-no-prisoners savvy and wit embodied by our triptych of heroines: Melfi's direction takes the expected, conventional route towards uplift, when one wonders what a Barry Jenkins, say, might have made of the same material. On the other hand, I can't imagine not feeling a lump in the throat, not least when the final credits reveal actual images of the women themselves (Johnson is nearing 100), via the same sort of pictorial epilogue on view at Lion and here entirely appropriate to this tribute to three great ladies and how they found it within themselves to roar.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Hidden Figures
Tom Birchenough
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.
It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to the front ranks of this year’s Academy Awards all the more impressive. And how skilfully Moonlight confounds definition by the categories into which it might easily be slotted – as a gay film, or a black film, however much both elements are crucial to its identity.
What’s more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust
To achieve something so universal, Jenkins has set his drama in a very particular location, the Liberty City district of Miami. It was where the director himself grew up, as did Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer from whose original drama treatment In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue the film is adapted. The two did not know each other then: what they did share in youth, however, was the experience of growing up with mothers who had drug addiction issues.
It’s there that we first encounter the film’s hero, 10-year-old Chiron (Alex Hibbert, slight, silent), who’s known as “Little”, the word that gives the first of Moonlight’s three sections its title. The second, which carries the boy’s given name, catches him at 16, now played by Ashton Sanders, gangly and avoiding eye contact. The third, with Chiron a young adult, is titled “Black”, after the moniker he’s now given himself (also an affectionately bestowed nickname he had acquired in the middle episode).
It’s not only physical slightness that sets Chiron apart: he’s treated as an outsider by his more aggressive contemporaries for another reason, one which they sense but he himself has not yet registered. The film opens with the latest of what we guess is a series of rejections, but this one ends on a more positive note with Little befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali). Of Cuban descent, Juan may be a community hard man and drug dealer, but he shows only kindness to this resolutely silent youngster, first feeding him and then taking him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).
Her home becomes a place of refuge for the troubled Chiron as the circumstances of his home life with mother Paula (Naomie Harris, falling gradually and hauntingly into full crack addiction), as well as that of this “adopted” family change. The other anchor point of Chiron’s world is his friendship with his contemporary Kevin, shown from innocent childhood games through to more loaded adolescent encounters, a bond that will also presage damage as the film progresses.
“At some point you've got to decide who you wanna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you,” Juan tells the boy at one point, his phrase catching the essence of what Moonlight is about: the shaping, the realisation of the eventual adult character. Juan’s words come shortly after one of the film’s tenderest moments, as he teaches the child to swim, though what’s actually more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust. The tragic irony that Ali’s character, the one who shows such concern for Chiron, is also dealing the substances that are bringing his mother down, prompts one of the most poignant moments of the first episode.
The defining moment of the succeeding section also takes place at the sea, as Chiron and Kevin talk on the beach (pictured above, Jharrel Jerome, left, with Ashton Sanders): Chiron once more risks trust, relaxing the barriers of self-protection that he has constructed around himself (“I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops”, he poignantly reveals). The cruelty is that hurt will again follow revelation, culminating in an act of self-assertion that will change the course of the young man’s life, sending him away from his home environment.
But distance is not the only change that comes with Moonlight’s final part. Trevante Rhodes (an erstwhile professional sportsman himself, physically powerful here, yet so damaged inside) plays the now adult Black, who’s bulked himself up protectively: he’s become a dealer, like his first mentor Juan, with a muscled body to match, teeth ribbed in gold. When Black makes an almost impromptu journey from his new home territory, Atlanta, back to Miami, his whole life comes up for reappraisal. (Pictured above: André Holland, left, with Trevante Rhodes.)
Jenkins’ choice of an elliptical narrative structure, one that registers change rather than spelling it out, is a stroke of genius. It also makes for the sheer freshness of impression that is so powerful in Moonlight, suitable not only for a story anchored in childhood, but also involving a hero who’s at times reticent almost to the point of speechlessness. It's as if the director defines his canvas through spots of colour that coalesce into an image, rather than through any direct stroke of the brush.
Moonlight’s visual sense is highly painterly, too, from the pastel tones of the Liberty City locations (James Laxton’s cinematography catches them with an easy beauty that surely belies their real character) through to the distinct colour orientations of the film’s three parts. There’s a sheer confidence in Nicholas Britell’s score too, melding what we might expect – rap, jukebox melodies – with the grand emotional assertions of Mozart. Comparisons already drawn with the likes of Terrence Malick are not incidental, such is Jenkins’s sheer flair: it's only his second feature, and to draw this quality of performance from his three male leads and supporting players alike is an almost impeccable achievement. Revelatory filmmaking.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Moonlight
Jasper Rees
The Great Wall is David Icke’s worst nightmare. David Icke (if you weren’t there in the 1980s) was a BBC snooker presenter. After ingesting a brain-rotting anti-elixir, he transmogrified into a doolally conspiracy theorist in a turquoise shell suit. He had a showpiece theory about lizards. Lizards – “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids,” he specified – were hiding in underground bases and were “a force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity”. There are half a dozen scriptwriters credited on The Great Wall.
Adam Sweeting
Last year we had Jennifer Lawrence as the queen of the QVC shopping channel in Joy. For 2017, here’s Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, a struggling travelling salesman who went on to become the driving force behind the McDonald's fast-food empire. I’m looking forward to seeing George Clooney as Colonel Sanders.
Graham Fuller
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.
David Kettle
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten what the original question was anyway.
Har’el’s previous documentary Bombay Beach, on a ruined ghost town in southern California, earned high praise for its fantastical visuals and its blurring of reality and fiction. She takes a similar approach here, but to a far less effective end. LoveTrue is undeniably striking in its weird imagery and its free-flowing structure, but whether it ever really engages with its theme is another matter entirely.
Har’el’s romantic investigations focus on three relationships from the furthest corners of the US. Alaskan self-confessed "nerd girl" Blake gets a lot of self-confidence from being a stripper in a lap-dancing club, she says, but she’s worried her boyfriend, who has a rare and debilitating bone condition, is drifting away from her. Hawaiian surfer dude Coconut Willie – who scrapes a living from shinning up coconut trees to retrieve their fruit – discovers that the infant he’s raising is not his son, but rather the son of his petulant ex-girlfriend and best mate. And in New York, the gospel-singing (and they do it brilliantly) Boyd family are still reeling from their mother’s sudden departure, with husband John offering his own pseudo-philosophical understandings of what their romantic problems were.
There are intriguing, contrasting perspectives on love here – and on the consequences when it breaks down. But Har’el seems reluctant to trust her subjects’ stories much, or even to tell them in a particularly clear or straightforward way. Instead, she seems to want to get inside her protagonists’ heads, to see the world from their individual perspectives – which might not give us many insights into love, even if it makes for some unforgettable visuals.
And when it works, Har’el’s dream-like sense of flow from scene to scene is a marvellous thing. As in an elegant segue from the pulsing Northern Lights to the gaudy neon of a cruddy Alaskan lap-dancing club. Or a downright creepy staging of a horrible bullying incident from Blake’s childhood, re-enacted on a bus lost in the woods that’s populated with sinister lifeless dummies (pictured above).
Har’el’s blurring of fact and fiction, though not a new trick, is one of the film’s most fascinating conceits – and also one of its most troublesome. It’s fine when we know what we’re watching isn’t real – as in Willie’s elaborately choreographed underwater skirmish with (supposedly) his love rival (pictured above), which his story builds to. But at other times, truth and fictions are considerably less easy to tell apart – as in New Yorker John’s strange appearance on a cable TV channel, expounding his theories on love.
LoveTrue is a film that wears its artifice proudly. It not only employs actors to play the younger and older versions of its main protagonists – signposting them with "Older Blake" or "Younger Willie" T-shirts – but also goes further in giving voice to those actors themselves, even allowing them conversations with the figures they’re meant to be playing. It’s all a bit head-turningly meta. But again, when it works, it’s a treat: arguably the film’s best thing is Snow (pictured below with Blake), the 49-year-old stripper drafted in to play an ageing Blake, but who soon takes on life in her own right to admit – heartbreakingly – that she’s no idea where her life is going.
But for all the visual cleverness, the garish colours and the dreamlike connections, the stories Har’el is telling just don’t end up seeming that interesting – or at least she doesn’t probe them strongly enough to discover much empathy. By the end of LoveTrue, we don’t get to know (and therefore care) much about any of her trio of protagonists – are they there simply because they’re a bit kooky? In any case, Har’el doesn’t seem compelled enough by them to tell their stories simply and sincerely, other than as a framework for her own unbridled imagination. LoveTrue is a thoroughly entertaining and stylish 80 minutes of cinema, but whether it shines any new light on one of life’s great mysteries – well, that’s another matter entirely.
Adam Sweeting
Fences is one of the best-known works by playwright August Wilson, part of his Century Cycle of plays exploring 100 years of black American history, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987. Wilson died in 2005, but further gongs greeted the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, including Tonys for its stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.
Graham Fuller
Travis Bickle’s Manhattan is long gone, and except for those nostalgic for its grindhouses and their exploitation fare, few surely regret its passing. It’s been years since any modern-day Travis could cruise in a yellow taxi along the erstwhile “Deuce” - the squalid stretch of porn emporia and strip clubs on West 42nd Street - turn north up Eighth Avenue to the high forties and accurately observe, “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” The rain - a reference to the Deluge - did come. After a decade of planning, the gentrification of Hell’s Kitchen (and Disneyfication of The Deuce) was effectively completed during Rudolph W Giuliani’s mayoralty in the Nineties, though some of the porn shops and strip clubs simply migrated a few blocks away.
No matter that Taxi Driver (1976, back out as a re-release from Park Circus this week) has the semblance of a dream, much of what Martin Scorsese shot for it was documentary footage. There was misery in its making. “I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places,” he tells Richard Schickel in the book Conversations with Scorsese. “That was, like, biblical in my mind, Hell and damnation and Jeremiah… I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. The sense of wallowing in it was, for me, always filled with tension and extraordinary depression. And the film is very, very depressing.”
Sociopaths invariably find excuses for their rage, but a cultural artefact cannot be held responsible
To David Thompson and Ian Christie, editors of Scorsese on Scorsese, he said, “We shot the film during a very hot summer and there’s an atmosphere at night that’s like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and touches the foot of a first-born son, who falls dead. That’s almost what it’s like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we would slide along after it. Many times people threatened us and we had to take off quickly.”
Living in Hell’s Kitchen in the late Eighties, I collected my own set of memories: a waif-like teen prostitute flagging down trucks outside my apartment house on 46th Street each lunchtime for weeks on end; spent condoms in the gutters; being stalked by the six-foot hustler I rebuffed on 42nd the only time I walked down the street at 1am. Hundreds of mentally ill and homeless people lived locally. It wasn’t simply a red-light district; it was a well of illness and pain.
That late-noir miasma lives on indelibly in Scorsese’s masterpiece, though for all its actuality it acquired a mythic aura in a way that other searing films depicting contemporary necropoli have not, among them Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986, London), Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993, London), Wim Wenders’s Land of Plenty (2004, Los Angeles) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006, Glasgow). Naked is a great film, but it is more ruminatively philosophical than Taxi Driver, which has a unique febrile energy; Scorsese himself couldn’t repeat it in Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
Taxi Driver’s undiminished power owes partially to Scorsese’s harnessing of Michael Johnson’s restless camerawork, with its ominous pans and tracking shots, and Bernard Herrmann’s insinuating sax-and-harp score (his last). Nothing was more important, though, than the jive of Paul Schrader’s voiceover for Robert De Niro as Travis and the kinetic rhythms of the stylised dialogue, some Schrader’s, some improvised, which flowed through the star, Harvey Keitel as the pimp Sport, and Jodie Foster as the 12-and-a-half-year-old Iris (pictured), whom Travis seeks to liberate from prostitution. It guided their body language - Travis is deliberate, Sport has a junkie’s jitters, Foster is a larky kid. (Cybill Shepherd as Betsy, the narcissistic, Beatrice-like campaign worker Travis stalks after she rejects him for taking her to a porno, is pleasing in a wholly different register.)
Haunted by John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and the tormented racist Ethan Edwards’s redemptive quest to rescue his teenage niece from miscegenation with a Comanche chief, Schrader first updated it in Hardcore (1978), about a Dutch Calvinist furniture manufacturer wresting his daughter from LA pornographers, then used it as the basis for Taxi Driver. The latter film is more psychologically and socially complex. Traumatised by what he’s seen and done in Vietnam (though it’s not mentioned), paranoid and puritanical, Travis wills himself to take murderous Oedipal revenge on Betsy’s and Iris’s father figures: first, he escapes, unidentified, his attempted assassination of the presidential candidate who’s Betsy’s boss; then goes after Sport (Keitel, pictured below) and his cohorts, resulting in one of the bloodiest götterdämmerungs in Hollywood cinema up to that point. He thus becomes the tabloid hero who earns Betsy’s respect - or is that the dying fantasy of the wounded vigilante who sits on the whorehouse couch? - and the madman who should be treated in a high-security hospital. He is a purger who requires something more than purgation: how shocking it still is to see him pulling the trigger of the gun he has pressed to his head.
In 1981, Travis inspired John Hinckley Jr, who wanted to impress Foster, to try to assassinate President Reagan. Taxi Driver thus acquired an undeserved notoriety. Blaming the film as the root cause of Hinckley’s act is akin to blaming it for Arthur Bremer’s 1972 shooting of George Wallace (Schrader read Bremer’s diaries before writing the script) or for Samuel Byck’s assassination attempt on President Nixon in 1974 (Schrader says he based “Bickle” on a radio show called The Bickersons, not “Byck”), which generated the 2004 Sean Penn film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
You could equally blame Travis for the shooting that killed six and left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded this past January. It makes no sense; sociopaths invariably find excuses for their rage, but a cultural artefact cannot be held responsible. More pertinently, Travis, as a metaphor, was a caustic agent poured not just on rampant vice, and a society that sanctions it as a corrupt form of business, but on a political culture founded on empty rhetoric and the crime of sending men to die in capitalist wars of ideology. Assuming Travis didn’t die from his neck wound, I like to think he’s still hacking it on the New York streets, without the guns.
- Taxi Driver is on limited re-release in UK cinemas. Screening information on the Park Circus website
- Read more film reviews on theartsdesk
MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
Hugo (2011). Scorsese does a Spielberg in sumptuous look at the origins of cinema
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). Con brio: Scorsese and DiCaprio tell of the rise and fall of a broker
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: watch the new trailer to Taxi Driver
Matt Wolf
There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. A dark comedy about a father who risks destroying the daughter he also clearly loves, the movie rides multiple shifts in tone with remarkable ease.