film directors
Saskia Baron
Mirai made animation history when it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2018, the first Japanese anime feature to be so honoured. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Director Mamoro Hosoda, who worked at Studio Ghibli before creative differences on Howl’s Moving Castle led him to strike out on his own, has been described as the natural successor to anime master, Hayao Miyazaki. Certainly they share extraordinary artistry and a fascination with children and the fantasies they create. But for me, Mirai lacked the otherworldly enchantment of Studio Ghibli classics like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The price of fame and the value of artistic truth are among the topics probed in Danny Boyle’s irresistible comedy, a beguiling magical mystery tour of an upside-down world where The Beatles suddenly never existed. Richard Curtis’s screenplay features some of his characteristic trademarks, not least the protagonist’s slapstick sidekick Rocky the roadie, but it’s illuminated by his fascination with popular music and the emotional resonance it carries.The premise (Jack Barth gets a credit for “story”) is that the entire world has suffered a mysterious power blackout for 12 seconds, and when the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.It was a warm Roman evening in Casa Zeffirelli in September 2009. The grandest old man of the arts — who worked with Callas and von Karajan, Tennessee Williams and Toscanini, Burton and Taylor and Olivier, who had the ear of popes, princes and prime ministers — was now visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923. “Il maestro”, as Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen directed by a woman. At the time, it seemed incredibly exciting and inspiring and while the film is still impressive and enjoyable, it’s somewhat less radical than I remembered. The film’s glorious costumes, ornate interiors and repetitive piano score threaten to obliterate its relatively subtle feminist message: I remembered it as more Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It has been ten years since Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan first debuted I Killed My Mother at the Cannes Film Festival. A decade on he returns in competition with a title that shows an evolution of his filmmaking that leaves behind many of the problems of his previous work.Matthias & Maxime is certainly more accessible, and will appeal to mainstream sensibilities as a tenderly rendered examination of male friendship. Thankfully, this feature allows Dolan to step away from the enfant terrible image that has been thrust upon him. It’s altogether more meditative – calmer, even – and all the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s third feature is a beautifully crafted example of the kind of Latin drama that is slow-burn and sensorial, conveying emotion through gestures and looks rather than dialogue or action. Nothing much seems to be happening, but before you know it you’ve been completed sucked in. Prompted by the writer/director’s own childhood on an ecological community outside Santiago, it offers a pithy, bitter-sweet reminder that idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and that children’s needs remain the same wherever they are: parental solidity, love, the freedom Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Moments before Quentin Tarantino’s blistering, outrageous work screened at Cannes, a message was delivered on behalf of the director, asking reviewers to avoid spoilers. It’s easy to see why. There’s a lot of pleasure in the film’s initial shock value, So yes, let’s avoid spoilers. But the surprises aren’t what make this film so good. Tarantino has form when it comes to handling ensemble pieces, but not since Pulp Fiction has it been so richly rendered. Yes, there are elements of Inglourious Basterds, and tonally reminiscent of Jackie Brown, but this film is Tarantino at his finest.The film Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Every year the Cannes Film Festival is a swirl of chaos, excitement, and controversy. Last year, the festival had a markedly different feel. Gone were the big starry names. Replacing them were less glitzy films that were given a chance to shine.There were delights like the monochrome wonder that was Cold War from Paweł Pawlikowski, and the magical-realist fable Happy as Lazarro from Alice Rohrwacher. Both directors are back again this year, sitting on the competition jury headed up by The Revenant director Alejandro González Iñárritu, alongside Elle Fanning, Yorgos Lanthimos, Enki Bilal, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a touch of Fellini’s 8 ½ in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. It’s a forlorn, confessional tale, with Antonio Banderas starring as Salvador Mallo, a director in the latter stages of his career. His character acts as a cypher for Almodóvar, allowing him to wrestle with themes of love, loss, and addiction.Mallo is in a rut, unable to write or direct due to numerous ailments that plague him, from migraines to back pain. He’s been asked to attend a retrospective screening of his one of his films. This event leads to him being reunited with the film’s star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia). They had Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Publishable, but worth it?” EM Forster’s hesitations about the value of Maurice, his novel of Edwardian homosexuality – written in 1913-14, it was published only posthumously, in 1971 – were certainly redeemed by James Ivory’s 1987 film of the book. Even if, typically, the only place where it wasn’t really well received was in its home territory, the UK: reactions elsewhere, from the Venice Film Festival where stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, through to distribution in France, where it apparently played for a year, were far more enthusiastic. But if any doubts Read more ...