Film
Graham Rickson
Czech animator Jiří Trnka’s rise to international fame mirrored that of his contemporary Karel Zeman, both filmmakers producing work as sophisticated as anything from the Disney studios but utterly different in style. Trnka (1912-1969) was a polymath, a gifted puppet maker, graphic artist, illustrator, sculptor and costume designer whose earliest shorts featured conventional two-dimensional drawings. Stop-motion animation offered more possibilities; however, one reason for Trnka’s preference for puppets being that it was possible to show figures in a state of stillness, of contemplation. His Read more ...
India Lewis
Director Charlie McDowell's The Summer Book is a beautiful, somewhat wistful film that follows the residents of a tiny Finnish island (daughter, father, grandmother) over a summer. The father (Anders Danielsen Lie, of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value) is mourning the death of his wife, whilst his mother (Glenn Close) provides brisk, no-nonsense comfort, and his daughter, Sophia (Emily Matthews), struggles to come to terms with her new life and the loss it involves.The film is adapted from Tove Jansson’s book of the same name and shares much of its episodic nature, as well Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalized, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Vicky Krieps is a guarantor of female integrity, whose characters rail against or ride roughshod over gender restrictions. Star turns from Phantom Thread’s steely ingenue to Corsage’s empress fighting to breathe share a searching, nonconformist intelligence and sensual warmth sometimes sheathed for survival. Love Me Tender’s Clémence seems a defining role. Fighting for custody of her child and expression of her queer, artistic identity when society expects more conservative motherhood, she’s a warrior in an unwinnable war.Director Anna Cazenave Cambet’s adaptation of Constance Debré’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with. He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.If only the same could be said of Dominic Sessa, who repurposes his debut performance as a surly youth, a cocktail of ego and insecurity, from The Holdovers. It’s easy to see why Sessa would be Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“How many cancer patients does it take to change a lightbulb? One and then 12 to say, ‘How inspiring.’” Bad taste jokes are all the rage among the kids at the summer camp for teenage cancer survivors in this quirky, uneven, coming-of-age rom-com directed and written by George Jacques, who is an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust and whose mother had breast cancer for long stretches of his childhood. There’s something rather contrived about his project though the cast is impressive and the film is well meaning and sometimes uplifting.Seventeen-year-old Ivy (an expressive Bella Ramsey) has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tom Holland is 30 now, and after a decade in the role his boyish Spider-Man muscularly comes of age in this fourth solo outing. A montage of street-level NYC crime-fighting sums up his activities since Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), when Peter Parker’s unmasking and the collateral damage of Aunt May’s death caused Dr Strange to magically wipe public knowledge of his secret identity, protecting loved ones such as girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) only by sacrificing that love’s existence.It’s a classic sf quandary which this latest instalment relishes working through. Parker has let himself be absorbed Read more ...
James Saynor
“Ish” is the name of the lead character in this movie, but it also might be a suffix attached to adjectives describing it. Here we have a sparkish piece full of smallish moments in a quietish town that’s typically dullish and British. For 12-year-old Ish, life is somewhere around okayish.As a result, Imran Perretta’s autobiographical debut feature, which is touchingly performed, observant and defiantly localised, is a little too tentative to stand out. It follows a few idle summer weeks in the life of an Asian-Muslim kid (Farhan Hasnat) who is alternately perky and withdrawn, which seems Read more ...
Graham Rickson
“Your civilisation is young but controlled by minds which are old,” says one of the alien Alphoids in Toomorrow to the four young musicians beamed aboard his spacecraft. He’s also hinting at one of the film’s problems; Toomorrow often feels like it’s been helmed by a creative team rather creakier than the young target audience, one contemporary review describing it as "a film for youngsters made by oldsters who are attempting to commercialise everything that’s dear to the teenage heart". That parts of it it resemble an extended episode of The Monkees is unsurprising, given that one of the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.Why did this woman in her late seventies decide to sue, 30 years after the assault? The documentary goes a long way towards answering that question, though essentially the answer is that Trump repeatedly defamed her after she made allegations of rape against him in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s film was a surprise hit at Cannes last year, winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. It’s a ghost story that wears its genre trappings lightly, because it isn’t a regular ghost story at all. None of the usual shock tactics are deployed; instead, an offbeat whimsical humour guides the narrative, to an unlikely destination.Boonbunchachoke sets us up in the opening sequence with a key theme: how to handle the past. We see a beautiful sculpted frieze in pale stone taking shape, based on a tableau of people from different walks of life – a soldier, a teacher, a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow. The honourable intent is to savage gun laws and the attention Read more ...