Film
Demetrios Matheou
If the recent period of British history that has involved recession, austerity, the hostile environment and Brexit is to have chroniclers, who better than Ken Loach and his trusty screenwriter Paul Laverty. Their blend of carefully researched social realism and nail-biting melodrama is angry, shaming, essential. Only the coldest-hearted bureaucrat or corporate heel could leave the cinema dry-eyed.Having exposed a merciless welfare system in I, Daniel Blake, they now turn their attention to the gig economy, that nefarious conceit that sounds funky yet allows public services to be Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ended in ice, Stephen King’s in fire which consumed the Overlook Hotel. King’s frightening, emotionally rich novel was written by an alcoholic about an alcoholic, Jack Torrance, and his suffering family. Kubrick’s film was about the Overlook, a chilly, impressive thing of obsessive patterns and iconic imagery. No wonder he left the hotel standing. Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s sequel, Doctor Sleep, is very much a warm-blooded King film, though set in Kubrick’s familiar world. Thoughtfully merging both classic sources allows him a last check-in at the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
This new Eureka! boxset of 4K and 2K restorations provides ample evidence as to why Samuel Fuller was venerated by such a wide range of film-makers, including Godard, Wenders, Scorsese and Tarantino. Often characterised as a purveyor of pulp cinema, Fuller was much more than that: his command of filmic story-telling across a multitude of genres – western, film noir, war film and melodrama – was exceptional. He had a very special mastery of film language, a fine sense of when to go from wide to close shot, change the pace of editing unexpectedly, and move the camera at the service of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) once belonged inside the city’s Californian Dream, symbolised for him by the grand Victorian-style house built by his granddad for their black family, only to be repossessed as the city soared out of their reach in the Nineties, a legend that has become his identity’s beating heart. This is Jimmie Fails’ own family story, fictionalised with childhood friend and director Talbot into a film of awkward, homemade, sometimes overweening beauty.It’s a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Starting life as a comic strip in 1938, The Addams Family seems to have reinvented itself for every generation. It’s the story of an odd-ball family from ‘The old country’ (where that is geographically located is by-the-by), who love the grim and gothic. Their outlandish ways were neatly juxtaposed against the wholesome values of American suburbia. The comic preached a message of acceptance which was rife with quirky and yes, kooky, humour. It’s a narrative construction that lends itself easily to being updated, without losing that original black magic. From its humble begins in the New Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In the opening scene of Alejandro Landes’s strange, beautiful but finally unsatisfying Monos, eight teenage guerrillas are playing football blindfold on a high mountain plateau. Why the blindfolds? Perhaps to warn us not to expect any light to be thrown on whys and wherefores in this unsettling, visually stunning film, with its echoes of Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now.These Colombian kids, some gender fluid and mostly first-time actors, are a convincingly feral, Mad Max-ish bunch, with names like Wolf, Bigfoot, Swede, Rambo and Lady. Their code name is Monos and they receive sporadic Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Sentient machines have taken over the Earth. The leader of the human rebellion is so effective that a robotic ‘terminator’ is sent back in time to ensure he’s never born. A guardian follows, to ensure he is. We’ve been here before. Even in the unadventurous, market-driven world of sequels, it’s remarkable just how stuck theTerminator films have been in their template, with the same basic premise, the same character dynamics, the same action sequences predicated on the relentlessness of the robot assassins, the same bewildering timeline. However, not all of them have had Sarah Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Police corruption has fuelled many a Hollywood thriller, but sadly Black and Blue is no Training Day or The Departed. Naomie Harris plays US Army veteran turned rookie cop Alicia West, just three weeks into a career with the New Orleans police department, who to her horror stumbles across a murderous conspiracy among her fellow officers. The plot is basically her race against the odds to expose the bad guys before they bump her off.Harris’s character is difficult to take seriously, since despite her apparently gruelling military experiences in Kandahar, she’s astonishingly naive about life on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The British Film Institute’s excellent Flipside strand resurrects neglected or marginalised UK movies, many of them reflecting the social flux of the 1960s and 1970s. Malcolm Leigh’s Legend of the Witches (1970, 85 mins) and Derek Ford’s Secret Rites (1971, 47 mins), which are paired in the latest Flipside release, capitalised not so much on the emergence of Wicca – legalised by 1951's repeal of the Witchcraft Act and endorsed by counterculturalism – as on the tabloids’ sensationalising of the occult.Legend of the Witches is a partially dramatised documentary that uses arty black-and-white Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Angelina Jolie is back again with those cut-glass cheekbones and ink-black wings, reprising her role as the self-proclaimed ‘Mistress of Evil’, in Joachim Rønning’s nauseating sequel to the 2014 live-action spin on Sleeping Beauty. As the first film taught us, Maleficent isn’t evil, she’s misunderstood. Rat-bag men sold her out, and ever since she’s been on warry of humans, except for her god-child Aurora. The legend we knew was just propaganda. All Maleficent wants is to protect her fellow fairies from the war-mongering ways of men. This time around, it’s not a man that’s the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about. Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, in which three of the four main fortysomething characters are having affairs, presents infidelity as rote behavior more calmly than would most British or American films, puritanism being not fully extinguished. Assayas doesn’t avoid raising the moral standard – he just doesn’t let it flap excessively.The film isn’t focused on adultery, however, but on the issue of digitisation's Read more ...