Film
Tom Baily
Another unnecessary sequel: we’re used to this sort of thing. The film knows it, too, as lead dork Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) meekly thanks the audience during the opening credits: “There are lots of options when it comes to zombie entertainment, so thank you for choosing us”. It’s a nice line, but feels like an apology for the film industry. “Bad films are everywhere, but this is the least bad”, he could have said. Fair enough. There are too many standard horror flicks, so shift the game (or try to).Zombie genre parodies have been on the rise (see also this year’s The Dead Don’t Die) since Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Early in the political drama Official Secrets, Keira Knightley’s real-life whistleblower Katharine Gun watches Tony Blair on television, giving his now infamous justification for the impending Iraq War, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction. “He keeps repeating the lie,” she cries. “Just because you’re the Prime Minister doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.”There’s simply no escaping the resonance. The current occupant of No 10 isn’t the first to be economical with the truth; the real shock is that we keep on putting up with it. And the power of the film resides Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to find oneself completely at odds with an audience in a cinema, but it happens. The recent London Film Festival screening of The Peanut Butter Falcon came complete with the two lead actors and the co-directors and their film went down a storm with a crowd of happy viewers, many of whom had learning disabilities themselves. They were delighted to see Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down’s Syndrome, play one of the three main characters. An independently-produced comedy-drama, it won the Audience Award at South by Southwest and has been a sleeper hit in the US. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Time passes slowly and remorselessly in The Irishman. Though its much remarked de-ageing technology lets us glimpse Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) executing German POWs aged 24, none of the gangsters here ever seem young. Everyone is heavy with experience, bloated with spilt blood. The Scorsese gang’s all here for what is surely his last stand in the genre - the returning De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, and a great Scorsese debut for Pacino. They’re assembled for the story of a gangster’s working life, from first killing to casket.Like Leone’s elegiac, De Niro-starring Once Upon a Time Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While recent motor racing movies have been built around superstar names like Ayrton Senna and James Hunt, the protagonists of Le Mans ’66 (shown at London Film Festival) will be barely recognisable to a wider audience. They are Carroll Shelby, the former American racing driver turned car designer, and Ken Miles, a British driver transplanted to American sports car racing. In a bid for some all-American racing prestige, their task was to help the Ford Motor Company to beat Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1966.In James Mangold’s film (with a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Will Smith’s giant hand looms out of the screen towards you, gripping his gun’s trigger with weird realism. Director Ang Lee’s lonely devotion to filming in 120 frames per second 4K 3D, already widely loathed by audiences in less developed form in his own Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2014) and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, is a huge, largely successful element in everything we see here.A script which had gathered dust for 20 years due to being technically unfilmable then sees Smith’s government hitman Henry Brogan forced out of retirement after being betrayed by his boss Clay (Clive Owen), Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A new film by Chris Morris ought to be an event. The agent provocateur of Brass Eye infamy has tended to rustle feathers and spark debate whatever he does. His last film, Four Lions, dared to find comedy in Islamic terrorism in 2010, when so many wounds were still so fresh. But that was almost a decade ago, and the signs are that Morris is losing his edge, while also in dire need of a new topic. The Day Shall Come again has terrorism as its subject, and moving countries and targets doesn’t overcome the sense of this being old ground. The starting point is the FBI Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Marriage Story, shown at the London Film Festival, feels like an instant classic, that intimate, tangible, resonant kind of classic that touches a chord with almost anyone. It’s not just a film about a divorce, but that added nightmare of a divorce with kids involved, and the yet more despairing experience of separating when there is still love. And it’s heart-breaking.It’s also funny, smart and, perhaps most significantly, balanced. As accomplished as the Oscar-laden Kramer v Kramer was, in 1979, one couldn’t help feeling that the cards were unfairly stacked against Meryl Streep’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sienna Miller’s career has been short on leading roles, though she excelled in the TV drama The Girl and has notched up some memorable supporting roles. However, if there’s any justice, her commanding and deeply-felt performance in American Woman should move her career up a gear.She plays Deb, a single mother in blue-collar Pennsylvania struggling to pay the bills by working as a waitress, while bringing up her teenage daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira). Her relationship with a married man gives her nothing except lurid sexual gratification and horrifies her deeply religious mother (Amy Madigan Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There used to be this myth that we knew nothing about the concentration camps until the victors opened their gates in 1945, and that the survivors were then nursed back to health. The Russians put out newsreels filmed weeks later of nurses tending to the children of Auschwitz, but the reality was that many had already been marched by the Nazis in the final stages of the war to camps like Gross-Rosen in south western Poland. And often when they were liberated, those children became just more human flotsam in the displaced persons camps that scarred Poland and Germany for years after the war Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A labour of love for its co-writer, producer and star Joel Edgerton, The King (showing at London Film Festival) is derived from Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V plays, but isn’t slavishly bound to them. If it were, Edgerton would have lost a major chunk of his role as Falstaff, who, rather than having his death reported by Mistress Quickly in Eastcheap, accompanies Henry V on his expedition to France as his trusted confidant.The screenplay, by Edgerton and director David Michôd, is determined not to be Shakespearean, though contrives to smuggle in some antique-sounding heft while not Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dolly Wells’ directorial debut employs her best friend Emily Mortimer as reclusive writer Julia Price, having paired up previously in a TV satire of their professionally uneven relationship, Doll and Em. Mortimer cameos this time, as posh twentysomething slacker Lilian (Grace Van Patten) comes to stay at her Brooklyn brownstone and, undeterred by never having opened a Price book or watched a documentary, surreptitiously begins a film about her enigmatic host.Frosty Julia and the tenant she calls a “lazy, entitled oaf” gradually soften each other’s edges. In a conceit happily forced on Wells Read more ...