film directors
Nick Hasted
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm.It's 1933, and Bert (Christian Bale) is a Catholic-Jewish doctor with a glass eye helping fellow traumatised Great War veterans in New York. His veteran best friend, lawyer Harold (John David Washington), asks him to autopsy their beloved commanding officer, whose daughter (Taylor Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career.Sangok is a former film actress who has returned from the US to Seoul to stay with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee, pictured below right with Lee). Though secretly carrying a heavy Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paris, 16 March 1960 – and cinema ruptured. The first public screening of the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, A Bout de Souffle, breathed life into an arthritic medium, announcing a new world of possibility.Its story, of a French petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who kills a cop and goes on the run with his pretty young lover (Jean Seberg), was deliberately drawn from the Hollywood films Godard and his fellow critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had consumed with monastic devotion in post-war cinématèques. But its execution liberated.In its first few minutes, the smooth, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bob Rafelson finally exiled himself, unable any longer to countenance the consuming nature of his filmmaking. As director, producer and writer in the Sixties and Seventies, he had helped create both New Hollywood’s fabled moment of auteur freedom and its greatest star, Jack Nicholson, in films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.But he spent his last 20 years simply helping to raise his two children in Aspen, Colorado, “alive but lonely”, he told Esquire. When the magazine visited in 2019, they found him still innately combative, in constant pain from heedless adventures reflected in his Read more ...
mark.kidel
Pickpocket regularly makes it into the list of best films of all times. It is a film-maker’s film, more of an essay on the art of cinema and a discourse on crime than a thriller. Much French art house cinema is characterised by serious intent and intellectual rigour, and Bresson may be, more than any other auteur, the pioneer of a cinema in which reflection and thought play as much of a part as the display of narrative or emotional excitement.Michel, played by the non-professional Martin LaSalle, is the thief who learns the tricks of his trade from a gang of professionals, and plays through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their terminus, collaging gnomic capitalist critiques holed up in Swiss self-exile, still fiercely repulsing acceptance.Claude Chabrol lasted almost as long making chilly thrillers beloved by the French public but distrusted by the academy, steeped in Lang and Hitchcock, but most of all Georges Simenon. He was similarly prolific and accepting of human Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Old footage from the band’s Leeds squat, Southview House, in the early Eighties, shows one of them jovially composing a song called “Norman Fowler is a Shit-stain in Margaret Thatcher’s Underpants” on an acoustic guitar (Norman Fowler was Thatcher’s Secretary of State at the time). It’s funny and silly, but also made me long for the era when art-fury was a common cultural Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome. He has always needed name actors who’ll go all the way, six-time collaborator Willem Dafoe’s devotion keeping his recent career going. Ethan Hawke is the star this time, playing twins – soldier JJ and revolutionary Justin – on apparently opposite sides of a plot to blow up the Vatican.Ferrara envisioned Zeros And Ones’ Rome as a “ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I would suggest watching River on the largest possible screen, so you can bask in the breathtaking beauty of the visuals. Directed by the Australian Jennifer Peedom, who won awards for Mountain and Sherpa, the documentary celebrates the magnificence of rivers and reminds us that we are utterly dependent on water for our survival. “Humans have long loved rivers,” says narrator Willem Dafoe but, he asks, “as we have learned to harness their power, have we also forgotten to revere them?”The answer, of course, is “yes” and the film reveals our propensity for treating rivers merely as resources – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the air echoes with wars and rumours of wars, Hive has the potential to strike a chord resonating way beyond its Kosovan setting. The factually-based story is set in the aftermath of the Balkan conflicts of the late 1990s, after Serbian forces had carved a trail of rape, murder and destruction through Kosovo’s Albanian communities.Written and directed by Kosovo-born Blerta Basholli, Hive looks at how a group of women returned to their devastated village of Krusha and set about salvaging some kind of life from the wreckage. Most of their husbands had been rounded up and “disappeared” by the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the hagiographic side. But Letts has led such a dynamic life that the lack of any critical voices is forgivable, especially when there’s a wealth of great archive (much of it from Letts’ own collection) and good anecdotes from the likes of Mick Jones, John Lydon and Daddy G.Born in Brixton to parents who had come over from Jamaica in the mid ‘50s to work on the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You generally find that a movie with Andrea Riseborough in it is worth a look, and so it proves here. Written and directed by Belfast-born Stacey Gregg, Here Before is a nicely-focused story which plays echoes of the supernatural off against a taut family drama set in a naturalistic, usually rain-dampened Northern Ireland. Refreshingly refusing to outstay its welcome, it profits from recognising its limitations (ie a small budget) and working within them.Laura (Riseborough) and Brandon (Jonjo O’Neill) are maintaining an even strain, keeping the family home ship-shape while bringing up their Read more ...