Film
Saskia Baron
If you’re looking for escapism from anxieties about Brexit, the worldwide refugee crisis and rising authoritarianism, Christian Petzold’s Transit is not going to provide comfort. Adapted from Anna Segher’s 1944 novel about a Jewish writer fleeing incarceration in Germany and trying to get passage to Mexico, this is a wholly original take on the Holocaust genre.Eschewing period costumes and art direction, Transit is an existential thriller filmed in present day France with Nazi uniforms replaced by police body armour. Georg (a mesmeric Franz Rogowski) sees a way to flee by taking on the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Quentin Tarantino’s made a big deal of this being his ninth film, while heralding his retirement after number 10 with the sort of nostalgic fandom he’s always ladled over his favourite directors and stars. Such self-consciousness (if not self-aggrandisement) is risky, because you’ve really got to deliver. Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood isn’t the masterpiece that some are claiming; it’s too rambling, self-indulgent and – despite a typically grand guignol ending – anti-climactic for that. But it is an evocative and entertaining paean to the Los Angeles of the filmmaker’s youth, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of everyday life.Kristen Stewart, with her own queer identity as a background hum, is a fine, understated match for the role of the androgynous Knoop, who was roped in by her sister-in-law, 40-year-old author Laura Albert (a harsh, one-note Laura Dern) to play LeRoy at literary events and parties. This is Knoop's side of the story, set in San Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ashley Joiner’s expansive documentary Are You Proud? opens with the testament of a redoubtable nonagenarian remembering his experiences as a gay man in World War II. Though followed by the admission that he had to live his later life as a lie, it’s told with considerable humour and concludes with a question – “How can you be criminalised for being born the way you are?” – to which the larger part of UK society would surely today reply with a degree of understanding.Whether it’s such tentative early moves towards reform – how good Fergus O’Brien’s 2017 film Against the Law was in bringing that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Modern children’s films wink knowingly over kids’ heads at their paying parents, as with the Lego movies’ rapid-fire pop-culture salvos. Lino DiSalvo (Disney’s Head of Animation for Frozen) could have sulked upon receiving the apparent short straw of rival Playmobil’s toys for his directorial debut. Instead, he finds modest charm in a simpler childhood world. The live-action opening sees 18-year-old Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) break into Disney-style song while delighting her 6-year-old brother Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) with adventurous possibilities, only for an especially perfunctory Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Filmmakers have an obsession with the music world that is beginning to seem unhealthy. In quick succession we’ve had two Abba musicals, biopics of Freddie Mercury and Elton John, A Star is Born with Lady Gaga and the Beatles fantasy Yesterday, most of which feel pretty B-side. Blinded by the Light does deserve a pressing, even if it pushes its luck. Directed by Gurindha Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), it’s a strange animal, a hybrid of coming-of age drama, comedy and musical, with a novel way of appropriating a music icon – in that the biography isn’t of the star Read more ...
Tom Baily
First-time collaborators Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell have tried to divert from the standard media narrative by looking at Gaza from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. The result is an observant documentary that attempts to avoid politics by collecting first-hand portraits, or what the directors call a “tapestry of characters”. Honesty, candour and hope abound, but hostility is never far away.There is a free-floating and casual mood to this film. The creators’ mission is clear: to sit back and let the people speak. For most of the film, we witness the ordinary, often mundane details of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Don’t Look Now is beautiful in its dankness – an eldritch psychological thriller that follows a grieving father’s stream-of-consciousness as it flows into deadly waters. Time Out 's critics have been magnanimous in twice voting Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Britain's greatest, but it sustains its power as a modernist conundrum. Spiffed up in 4K and Ultra HD for the four-disc set, it's one of 2019's homevideo treats.Allan Scott and Chris Bryant adapted the screenplay from a short story published as part of a Daphne du Maurier collection in 1971. Wearing a shiny red plastic mac, Christine, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The English-language drama Holiday, Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf’s feature debut, is an anthropological study of the corrosive effects of absolute male power and calcified misogyny. Inspired by a book written by Eklöf’s co-writer Johanne Algren and drawing on their experiences, as well as those of their gifted lead actor Victoria Carmen Sonne, it’s a harrowing movie – one of the most urgent of the #MeToo era.After deplaning at an airport that serves the Turkish Riviera and coaching into the port town of Bodrum, the protagonist Sascha (Sonne), a fragile woman of about 22, crouches on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a scathing and heartfelt coming of age drama, though not of the adolescent kind. Tyler and Laura are soulmates and flatmates, two single women blazing a riotous trail of booze, sex and drugs through the bars and basements of Dublin. But with Tyler turning 30 and with Laura two years ahead of her, the spectre of delayed-action adulthood is looming.“Sooner or later the party has to end,” warns Laura’s sister Jean. We know she used to be a wild one herself, from an incandescent scene of her carousing naked and vajazzled in a crowded bar, but now she’s a wife and new mother facing grown- Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“Movies are all the same,” says one character in Photograph, the latest film from India independent director, Ritesh Batra. It’s true, the plot feels familiar, but if stories are all the same, it’s how you play with the form that makes a film a success or not. Batra once again shows he knows how to craft a good story. Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a struggling street photographer. His days are spend snapping tourists next to the Gateway of India in Mumbai. It’s in this tourist trap that he meets Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a younger woman who is still living at home and studying to become Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You know twinkle toes, in another life I bet me and you could’ve done some serious damage.” When Jason Statham’s bad guy turned good finally warmed to Dwayne Johnson’s cartoon-like lawman in Fast & Furious 8, it could well have been a cue for this spin-off focussed on the two bickering beefcakes.It seems a smart call. Once the Fast & Furious franchise swapped its custom car testosterone and faux-Zen philosophy for more extravagant action and tongue-in-cheek banter, it became infinitely more enjoyable. And the rivalry between Statham’s Deckard Shaw and Johnson’s Luke Read more ...