Film
Demetrios Matheou
It only takes a few seconds of Saint Maud – dripping blood, a dead body contorted on a gurney, a young woman’s deranged face staring at an insect on the ceiling, an industrial clamour more likely to score the gates of hell than the pearly ones – to make us realise that the film’s title is a tad ironic. That irony will become even sharper, and mordantly witty, when we find that for the eponymous hospital nurse turned private carer (references no doubt fudged for the private sector), sainthood would be most welcome. “What’s the plan?” she asks of God, with whom she Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he calls his ‘witness statement’, a Netflix documentary that not only charts Attenborough’s remarkable career, but also how the world has changed for the worse over those years. Biodiversity is dwindling, and with it goes humanity’s future prospects. Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey for Netflix, we go from seeing Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On the Rocks has an unusual premise. Laura (Rashida Jones), a New York City novelist and mother of two young daughters, suspects her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair with a co-worker, Fiona (Jessica Henwick). Laura confides her fears to Felix (Bill Murray) and they’re soon zipping around Manhattan at night pursuing Dean and Fiona in Felix’s dyspeptic Alfa Romeo. But Felix isn’t a seedy detective who does divorce work like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown – he’s a well-off, semi-retired art dealer and, what’s more, he’s Laura’s feckless father. The seventh feature written and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much of Vitalina Varela takes place in near darkness, the lack of movement in several scenes enough to make you think you’re watching a succession of still images. Pedro Costa’s protagonists may wrestle with a multitude of intractable issues, but the warmth and humanity with which they’re portrayed is humbling. Costa’s starting point was a sequence in his previous film Horse Money, a monologue from a woman recently arrived in Lisbon from Cape Verde to attend the funeral of the husband she has not seen for several years.Here, the titular Vitalina Varela gets to tell her own story at greater Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are films to meet every taste in theartsdesk's guide to the best movies currently on release. In our considered opinion, any of the titles below is well worth your attention.Enola Holmes ★★★★ Millie Bobby Brown gives the patriarchy what-for in a new Sherlock-related franchiseEternal Beauty ★★★★ Craig Roberts's fantasy conjurs surreal images and magnetic performancesI'm Thinking of Ending Things ★★★★ Charlie Kaufman's eerie road trip through love and lossLes Misérables ★★★★★ An immersive, morally complex thriller set in the troubled suburbs of present day ParisMax Richter's Sleep ★★★★ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An aerial shot gliding over red-streaked buttes in the Southwestern American desert picks out a man striding across the blasted terrain some miles away. He halts and the camera comes close for a montage. We see that he is middle-aged, bony, and unshaven and wears a jacket, tie and red baseball cap.He drains his water bottle and a hungry hawk settles on a rock nearby. Each unforgiving twang of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar on the soundtrack signals a crisis, but the man has only a vaguely worried expression on his face. He hasn’t realized that tramping across this death valley is bringing him no Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What news on the rialto? Not much of particular buoyancy or light in the Peter Mackie Burns film Rialto, which takes a grimly focused view of a married Irishman's struggle with his same-sex leanings. Adapted by Mark O'Halloran from his 2011 stage two-hander Trade, the movie is anchored by superb performances from a trio of talents who will be known to theatre devotees. Even so, the result feels a bit of a slog by the time this story of feelings too-long inheld and then released has reached its nicely open-ended conclusion: a bit more tonal variety here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. Read more ...
Owen Richards
Barring a few outliers, British indies tend to follow the same formula: serious subjects told seriously. Whether it’s a council estate, a rural farm, or a seaside town, you can always rely on that trademark tension and realism we Brits do so well. What a shock to the system Eternal Beauty is then, filled with more imagination than almost anything else out this year.Sally Hawkins stars as Jane, a woman struggling to keep a grasp of her mental health. Her issues are compounded by her sociopathic mother (Penelope Wilton), narcissistic sister (Billie Piper), and a fiancée that dumped her at the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Aaron Sorkin’s latest powerhouse drama couldn’t come at a more opportune moment. Rife with the director’s rapid-fire dialogue, this courtroom drama is set in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and bubbles (sometimes froths) with a raw energy, tackling the thorny subjects of justice, racial equality and war. The setting might be period but, as recent news stories show, the fight for democracy is as fierce as ever, and Sorkin uses his entire arsenal of staunchly liberal ideology, theatrical dialogue and hard-hitting monologues to deliver his message. Cutting Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This fifth feature from Claire Denis must surely be the director’s most sheerly concentrated film. Scaling back narrative and dialogue alike – story elucidation relies mainly on intermittent retrospective voice-over narration – Beau Travail engages the viewer instead with its sensual elements (“A Cinema of Sensation” is the title of the essay by critic Girish Shambu that comes with this new Criterion edition). It’s absorbing in every sense – from the choreographically stylised gestures of its military protagonists to the parched desert surroundings of Djibouti, a striking presence in itself, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Beauty queen pageants have long been ripe for parody, from their plastic glamour to the Machiavellian competitiveness. Miss Juneteenth opts for a much more nuanced approach, using the pageant as a focal point for a mother and daughter navigating their difficult present and possible future. It’s a universal story of familial love, told and performed with deftness and real personality.Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise Jones, a former Miss Juneteenth, whose life never lived up to the promise of that title. Unlike so many high-flying winners, she’s a single mother working two jobs as a bar worker Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Building very promisingly on the achievement of his debut feature Lilting from six years ago, in Monsoon Hong Khaou has crafted a delicate study of displacement and loss, one that’s all the more memorable for being understated. Cultural disorientation is becoming almost a trademark for the director, and it’s present in his new film in what feels a more personal context. Monsoon follows its thirtysomething protagonist Kit, who left Vietnam as a child to grow up in the Britain that is now his home, as he returns to the country of his birth in the wake of his mother’s death: transplanted into a Read more ...