Film
Thomas H. Green
“All this evil and dark crap was supposed to be fun,” complains exasperated Norwegian black metal overlord Euronymous, played by Rory Culkin, as his world spirals out of control in a cataclysm of murder, suicide and church burnings. The true events that inspired Lords of Chaos are some of the most bizarre and twisted in the history of popular music. Fun they are not. Freakish, depressing and horrific, certainly. Strangely, however, the film is, upon occasion, very funny.Director Jonas Åkerlund is primarily renowned as the man behind ground-breaking pop videos (notably for Madonna, Lady Gaga Read more ...
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. As the sexually charged long take progresses, it becomes apparent that what started out as an erotic provocation (catering to Katie’s palpable attraction to her) gradually descends into Alicja’s traumatic memory of sexual abuse. Despite the disturbing situation unfolding in front of her, Katie continues recording, and we – as the audience watching through her lens – become Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Donald Trump’s former strategist, alt-right propagandist and all-round provocateur Steve Bannon comes under the spotlight of a smart, dynamic, behind-closed-doors documentary, as he attempts to turn his brand of far-right populism into a global movement. Adroitly mixing fly-on-the-wall material with news archive, director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) follows Bannon as he campaigns behind the scenes of the 2018 US mid-terms and casts his beady eye on the EU elections. In so doing, she offers a chilling glimpse into the reactionary forces that are seeking to exploit Read more ...
Owen Richards
You wait 50 years for a moon landing documentary, then two come along at once! With Apollo 11 still showing in cinemas, along comes Armstrong. But while the former focuses solely on the lunar mission through archive footage, the latter is the wider story of the man behind those famous first words. Told with support from modern interviews and his own writings (voiced by the irrepresible Harrison Ford), we follow Neil Armstrong's journey from Wapakoneta, Ohio to the moon and back again.Though he will always be remembered as one of the greatest humans to have lived, Armstrong is something of a Read more ...
Tom Baily
Deadpan humour is given new meaning in Jim Jarmusch’s 13th film, a zombie comedy animated by his typical oddball style. Jarmusch has assembled a grand cast comprising recent collaborators Adam Driver and Bill Murray, long-term musician pals Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA, and a swathe of newbies that includes Selena Gomez. It is an orchestrated confusion, lurching somewhere between a joyfully zany tribute and an over-intelligent, at times dark, social critique.Things get weird from scene one in the fictional middle America town of Centerville. Polar fracking has tilted the earth’s axis and this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Annabelle, the demonically-possessed doll now making its third appearance, makes its intentions clear pretty early here. Scarred by earlier misadventures so no sane child would want it, and sitting balefully in the back car-seat of married demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the latter pictured below), she is soon making vehicles crash and ghosts rise, in a vain effort to prevent her incarceration in the Warrens’ Artifact Room. This chamber of cursed curiosities sits at the heart of the suburban home they share with their young daughter, Judy (Mckenna Grace Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The excellent booklet essay by Michael Brooke that accompanies this Second Run release of Pavel Juráček’s second, and final feature (it’s presented in a fine 4K restoration) tells us much about the director’s importance for the Czech New Wave, that remarkable period of independent filmmaking that spanned the 1960s. It was brought to an end, of course, by the Soviet intervention in 1968. A Case for a Rookie Hangman intriguingly spans that crucial dividing line: written in 1966, it was filmed only in 1969 and released two years after that, albeit only on a very limited scale (for many observers Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You do like to have your cake and eat it, Vity. So many cakes, so many,” laments Harold Nicholson (Rupert Penry-Jones) to his wife Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) as she embarks on an affair with Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki).The Bloomsberries have been parodied so often – I kept thinking here that I was watching a version of Radio 4’s Gloomsbury, with Miriam Margolyes as Vera Sackcloth-Vest – that it’s hard to take director Chanya Button’s interpretation seriously.It constantly verges on pastiche, with everyone rolling their r's in a verry 1920s upper-class way and Virginia, when Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.Think of your worst romantic relationship, the one that churned you up inside and left you a sobbing mess for months. This is the territory that Aster mines in his latest work. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a post-grad student whose life is split between worrying about her suicidal, bipolar sister, and her relationship with Christian Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.Loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s foremost visual artist, his new film Never Look Away, epic in scale, the story spanning several decades over more than three hours, is a dramatic rollercoaster, both a pleasure and shocking to watch. It is also very moving. And yet, although made with great brio – the camerawork, editing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s no rest for the webbed wonder in Spiderman: Far from Home. It’s just a few months since Marvel wiped out Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame and his protégé Peter Parker is being hounded to fill Tony Stark’s place. Iron Man didn’t give the teenager his high-tech Spidey suit just for him to stuff it in the back of the wardrobe and get on with being a normal teenager, not when the planet is in danger (again). Tom Holland, so endearing in 2017’s Spiderman: Homecoming, is a little overwhelmed by the responsibilities thrust upon him. The young British actor is adept at Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mirai made animation history when it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2018, the first Japanese anime feature to be so honoured. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Director Mamoro Hosoda, who worked at Studio Ghibli before creative differences on Howl’s Moving Castle led him to strike out on his own, has been described as the natural successor to anime master, Hayao Miyazaki. Certainly they share extraordinary artistry and a fascination with children and the fantasies they create. But for me, Mirai lacked the otherworldly enchantment of Studio Ghibli classics like Read more ...