film directors
Owen Richards
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management. Across its runtime, the documentary answers this in no uncertain terms: this is who she’s always been, and mainstream success is a by-product of her unflinching, challenging nature. It builds a compelling picture of one of music’s most singular stars.Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (titled after her birth name, anglicised nickname and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star player to come out as gay while continuing to play at the top of the game, is no secret. Two decades on from the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the destructive consequences are all too well known; recent fictional reminders, such as John Donnelly’s The Pass (made into an accomplished film by Ben A Williams two years ago), suggest that little has changed. Read more ...
Steven Eastwood
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.Hazanavicius Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is Desiree Akhavan’s second film, following on from her rather ironically titled Appropriate Behaviour of 2014. That was a coming-out drama about a bisexual, Iranian-American woman, whose story closely reflected the director’s own – and Akhavan played its lead role, too. With The Miseducation of Cameron Post, she has widened her perspective considerably, and her new film, while surely retaining gay community admirers, will also speak, it must be hoped, to a considerably wider audience. On which note, mainstream name Chloë Grace Moretz’s presence in the title role, as well as the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity. But what if we could be transported back in time to when that romance was at its peak? Cold War is Pawel Pawlikowski’s first film since winning the Oscar for Ida in 2015. It’s a long-nurtured drama inspired by his parents’ own volatile relationship which saw them leaving Poland, leaving each other, marrying other people only to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“To our enormous suffering!” There are many macabre vodka toasts, accompanied by some appropriately gruelling visuals, in A Gentle Creature, but that one surely best captures the beyond-nihilist mood of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2017 Cannes competition contender. It’s a film guaranteed to leave viewers – those who make it through to the end of its (somewhat overlong) 140-minute-plus run, that is – scrabbling to find words to describe what they have just seen. The likes of “visceral” or “phantasmagoric” somehow aren’t enough to catch the film’s mixture of horror and hallucination, both elements made Read more ...
Owen Richards
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another biography on America’s first son, but a study on the persona, the myth and the brand that was created around him.Everyone has their own idea of who he was: the hip-swivelling rebel, the military hero, the irresistible leading man, the grotesque Vegas attraction. He was, in every complex and contradictory way, the living embodiment of the United States Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Fifty years after the 1968 Soviet invasion that so brutally interrupted it, the Czech New Wave really is a gift that keeps on giving. It still astounds that such a sheer variety of cinema was created in so short a time – really just six or seven years, not even a decade – by such a range of talent. It’s a rich vein of film history, one that has been revealed in recent years in exemplary releases from distributor Second Run; if it left you with any concern, it was when this remarkable source might begin to dry up.Not for a long time, if their latest is anything to go by, though it’s no less Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A slow tracking shot over the gassed corpses of soldiers, their masks having failed the ecstasy of fumbling, opens The Guardians. This French art house film would perhaps have been better served by the English title The Caretakers; it's closer to the original French meaning and would have made it less likely to be confused with a superhero movie. Set during the years when the Great War devastated France, the battle front only makes two dreamlike appearances in Xavier Beauvois’ meticulously crafted, slow-paced drama. Instead the focus is on a family farm in the Limousin and the women Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal. Many would argue that this is the greatest cinematic fairytale, and it looks stunning in this high definition restoration (its first appearance in HD in the UK). Everything works here; Cocteau’s unfussy, poetic screenplay brilliantly served by Christian Bérard’s designs and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-cultural bonding, with accompanying ruminations about changing human landscapes and fate, that moves it far beyond the expected.We first meet her protagonists, a group of German construction workers, at their dour backwater home base as they’re preparing for the next job, and sense something of the group’s dynamics. But the assignment ahead isn’t at Read more ...