For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)
film reviews
Saskia Baron
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years.
James Saynor
You don’t have to be a casting director to know that Britain has a remarkable reservoir of unstarry middle-aged actors who might, just occasionally, get top spot in a movie – Joanna Scanlon in the wondrous After Love (2020) being an excellent example. Now we have Maggie O’Neill, veteran of TV shows like Shameless, Peak Practice and EastEnders, who takes the lead in this equally likeable effort by writer-director Leo Leigh.
Saskia Baron
This fascinating American documentary tackles the societal and medical treatment of the 1.7% of people born with intersex traits that leave them with sex characteristics (chromosome patterns, genitals, gonads) that aren’t obviously male or female. These people are the ‘I’ in the LGBTQI+ acronym.
Nick Hasted
Water glassily reflects in a bridal train, the sun moves between trees, giving way to metal book-leaves, and inside a warehouse so vast he cycles through it, stored cliffs of Anselm Kiefer’s work loom over him. Wim Wenders’ 3D cameras bring you inside the artist’s monumental, mythic world, which he is uniquely equipped to comprehend.
Justine Elias
Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?
Anthony Cecil
The Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922, in which tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers, is a topical subject for our dark times. Unfortunately the intervening century hasn’t put an end to ethnic cleansing or to the plight of refugees.
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.
Saskia Baron
There’s a rich seam of folk stories about changelings, infants snatched from home and replaced with a substitute child, to the horror and bewilderment of their parents. The myth taps into parental anxieties that rear up when their offspring doesn’t resemble them. Harsh rejection of this seemingly alien being, who has usurped the place of a beloved child and threatens family harmony, is traumatic.