Film
graham.rickson
The Children’s Film Foundation began life in 1950, its brief to provide wholesome home-grown entertainment for Saturday morning cinema audiences. Instead of westerns and cartoons, young UK filmgoers were treated to low budget short features, usually involving plucky youngsters foiling dastardly criminal plots. They were produced up until the late 1980s, the organisation living on today as the Children’s Media Foundation. The BFI’s second box set of CFF features is every bit as good as the first instalment, and sifting through the nine films included here emphasises the company’s strengths. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour is back on home territory with her new film, and you’ll recognise much here from her characterful 2012 debut Wadjda, itself the first-ever feature to emerge from her home country. That was about challenging the restrictions that the culture of Saudi Arabia imposed on women, and some really have gone in the intervening years – women can now drive, for one. As if to mark that progress, the opening scene of The Perfect Candidate has Mansour’s doctor heroine, Maryam (Mila Alzahrani), her face hidden except for the eyes by a black niqab, behind the wheel as she Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Imagine being trapped in your perfect home forever. It’s easy if you try now, as Vivarium’s allegory about property and parenthood is deepened by events. Following young couple Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) through a Black Mirror-style real estate nightmare, it constructs a creepy alternative suburbia which tests their relationship to destruction.Director Lorcan Finnegan’s first image is the unsettling alien maw of a cuckoo, as it tosses rival birds from their nest. “It’s only horrible sometimes,” keen primary school teacher Gemma says of nature to a watching child, before Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Benni, the central character in German writer-director Nora Fingscheidt's haunting new film, has a life of tragedy and violence. She’s the product of a dysfunctional family and an abusive childhood that has left her rage-ridden and incapable of controlling her anger. Playing Benni is talented newcomer Helena Zengel. Over the course of two hours she rages, weeps and wails across the screen in an utterly harrowing performance. Behind her waif-like appearance lies a fury that most people don’t achieve in a lifetime, much of which is conveyed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
After Robert Altman re-established his critical reputation with The Player in 1992, he directed nine more films – including two of his most ambitious multiple-character works, Short-Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001).In terms of notable speaking parts, his Kansas City from 1996 was a comparatively modest undertaking. Yet Altman's evocation of his Missouri hometown in 1934 as a nocturnal maelstrom of political corruption, Mob raids, and shaking jazz joints gave it an epic-intimate quality – like a Thomas Hart Benton canvas come to life. You can really believe you’re there, as the saying Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This lovely, contemplative Cannes prize-winner has something to teach us in testing times. Filmed in director Oliver Laxe’s grandparents’ Galician village, it observes convicted arsonist Amador’s return from jail to the fire-prone landscape he’s blamed for devastating. This is slow cinema, smouldering with hurt but attentive to beauty and kindness, as Amador settles back into rural rhythms and his elderly, stoic mum’s care.The land, lush and sodden early on, has a painterly palette, and Laxe drinks in its supernal sights. A great bridge appears spindly between mountains, mum Benedicta hides Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The crass Disneyfication of the Beauty and the Beast tale crumbles in the face of Chained for Life. Starring Jess Weixler and Adam Pearson, writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s Altman-esque US indie – a low-key autumn 2019 release now available on a limited-edition Blu-ray – mordantly satirizes the universal act of judging people by their appearances, along with patronizing attitudes to otherness. Its moments of tenderness, however, are stirring.Weixler (star of the 2007 vagina dentata horror comedy Teeth) plays Mabel, the neurotically woke star of a cheap modern-day “mad scientist” movie whose Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi adapted and co-directed both films. She also wrote and illustrated the comic books on which they were based. Over the past ten years, Satrapi has parlayed her success as a cartoonist into a formidable career as a filmmaker. Her latest film is her biggest. Radioactive is a wide-ranging biopic about the life of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme d’Or at Cannes two years ago, has made a distinctive move away from his native environment – and, no less importantly, language: apart from a few scenes played in English, this is a French-language piece – in a film that catches the tone and nuances of French cinema with a finesse that’s as delightful as it is convincing.Occasionally it feels Read more ...
graham.rickson
Humphrey Bogart. John Huston. Gina Lollobrigida. Peter Lorre. Truman Capote! What could possibly go wrong? There’s the screenplay for starters: Capote gets top billing, and I’d long understood that he and Huston together wrote 1953's Beat the Devil on the hoof, script pages being typed up only minutes before they were handed to the cast. Huston adapted a novel by journalist Claude Cockburn, whose late son Alexander later complained that fans of the film “professed to find evidence of Capote’s mastery in every interstice of the dialogue… but his contribution was limited to some concluding Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie (Amy Manson), and the father of twentyish Kid (Anders Hayward) and adolescent Stevie (Scott Murray), Finnie wants to get the hell out – or he thinks he does. At its core, Run is about being mature enough to recognize your glass is half full.The film completes Graham’s trilogy about ordinary people yearning to escape their constricted lives. Like Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal, autistic five-year-old son and the kinds of friends who get him into trouble. Chief among them is Dympna (Barry Keoghan, in a wholly chilling performance), the heir apparent to the local drug-dealing Devers clan. Dympna exploits Arm’s pugilism to add muscle to his verbal threats. Violence is the Devers’ modus operandi and Calm with Horses veers Read more ...