Film
Kieron Tyler
Fusing genres to come up with unique takes on familiar tropes can be risky. The unwieldy results may be an unappetising mess. Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, where Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi fought for space in an unfunny 1952 fusion of comedy and horror was dreadful. Then there was 1966’s unwatchable Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, which drew the line between beach movie froth and (once again) horror. With its gang of leather-clad undead, Psychomania (1973), recast the biker film. Unlike many horror syntheses, it was deadly serious. With nothing played for laughs it was consequently one of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having recently seen Chris Pine reprising his role as the headstrong but heroic Captain James T Kirk in the latest Star Trek, it's a revelation to find him in this gritty tale of crime, punishment, righted wrongs and moral ambiguity. To his credit, he doesn't wilt in the glare of his co-stars Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster, both of whom are giving it both barrels here.One way of looking at Hell or High Water is to consider it as a double buddy movie. It's the story of West Texas brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Pine and Foster), who rob a string of local banks in order to pay off a reverse Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bruce Chatwin’s sense of place stayed slippery. If he had roots, they were in the Black Mountains across the Welsh border, a fond childhood memory he deepened for his third book with the rich anecdotes buried in old newspapers. The tale this iconoclastic travel writer spun in On the Black Hill was of twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, who stay put in their patch of Wales as the 20th century and its World Wars grind past them, like the noise of a car in the next field. Book and film are about lives in a landscape, each enriching the other.Writer-director Andrew Grieve also had childhood Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
"Did she bite you often?" Julien Gahyde (Mathieu Amalric) is being questioned about his affair in minute detail, over and over again, by lawyers and detectives. This is an ingenious flashback device. We don’t know yet what crime has been committed, but his lover Esther (Stéphanie Cléau) draws blood right at the start of this claustrophobic and ambiguous film, set in a provincial French town somewhere near Poitiers.Their passion is the grandest thing for miles around: you can sense the frustration behind the unassuming shop-fronts and flat landscapes. La France profonde-ly dull, where everyone Read more ...
james.woodall
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.Factually, there’s little with which the Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind director can grab even the most noddingly acquainted. Four boys from very modest backgrounds test themselves as a band in the early 1960s in Europe’s raciest city (Hamburg), get noticed in a scuzzy Liverpool basement by a posh shopkeeper (Brian Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both. Werner Herzog, with Aguirre, God of Wrath and Fitzcarraldo, managed to temper the exoticism that tends to colour the outsider’s view of nature untouched and cultures Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Whatever one thinks of Café Society - and responses to Woody Allen's latest as ever are likely to be divided - few will dispute the visual lustre that the legendary cameraman Vittorio Storaro has brought to this tale of love upended and deferred, set in 1930s Hollywood to a period-perfect soundtrack pulsing with the music of Rodgers and Hart.Every frame has a ready-made, natural shimmer that communicates Allen's love affair with the cinema, however one responds to a narrative about displaced nebbish Bobby Dorfman (Allen soundalike Jesse Eisenberg), who falls hard for LA glamour girl Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the many astonishing things in Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth film is watching Isabelle Huppert hold back tears. In one scene they smear almost involuntarily down her face, in another she transforms them into a bark of nervous laughter. Huppert plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a sixty-something Paris philosophy teacher, who paces the film with almost frantic speed while her life unravels around her.Finally, when the immediate causes of her grief have passed, she surrenders to sobbing. It’s a beautifully delayed scene that catches the build-up of emotions (pictured below), her only company in her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio the Kelly Affair’s assimilation into and corruption by Hollywood. Renamed the Carrie Nations, they consume drugs, have ill-advised sexual liaisons and sell records by the bucketful. Good-natured singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) side-lines her boyfriend – their manager – to purse an affair with a money grubbing beefcake.Characters vampirically Read more ...
David Nice
Luchino Visconti's penultimate film, made entirely in a studio recreation of a two-floor Roman apartment for the benefit of the semi-invalid director, is an atmospheric drama split down the middle.The better half of it is very definitely Burt Lancaster's restrained characterisation of the alter-ego Professor, withdrawn from the world and devoted now to collecting family-group portraits; his world is an amazing recreation of a patrician's rooms, looking good in this 2K restoration. The other aspect has dated horribly. This is the portrayal of a group of brash and sometimes violent "people of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Women in Love was Ken Russell’s first cinema film to directly reflect his work in television. He had directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), but that was an adaptation of a Len Deighton book. French Dressing (1964) was a few steps removed from a Carry On film. As an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, Women in Love (1969) tapped into the ethos of his work for the BBC and featured Oliver Reed, with whom he had worked in television. While Reed’s naked wrestling scene with Alan Bates was a sure-fire attention grabber the film, nonetheless, didn’t have quite the free-spirited spark of Russell' Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Red, the colour of blood, passion, love and hate, is Almodóvar’s trademark and in Julieta, his 20th film (and surely one of his most visually lustrous), it’s never far away. It’s there in the opening sequence, a close-up of thick folds of red fabric moving like a curtain. Then we see, as the camera cuts away, that it’s a dress worn by Julieta, a woman in her fifties (Emma Suarez, pictured below).She’s new to Almodóvar, as are most of the actresses in the film apart from his idiosyncratic muse Rossy de Palma and Susi Sanchez (the soundtrack is written by his usual musician, Alberto Iglesias). Read more ...