Film
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This fifth edition of Sundance’s London offshoot covered the first moon landing in Apollo 11, probed philosophical pranksters The Satanic Temple in Hail Satan? and took a trip through the alt-right world of Steve Bannon in The Brink. In between there was drama, melodrama, black comedy and social commentary. Theartsdesk took a tour. The FarewellBased on the experiences of writer/director Lulu Wang, The Farewell is a perceptive examination of family bonds, generational differences and cultural contrasts. Awkwafina (former YouTube rapper turned rising film actress) plays Billi, a Chinese Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Just how many cinematic universes can one planet stand? Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island’s Apocalypse Now/ape mash-up suggested there might be useful room for old-school creature features amidst the superhero surfeit. As random, rococo mythology and super-sized spectacle crash frenetically together in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this third instalment of the ineptly named MonsterVerse is often great fun. But you can sometimes glimpse talented people working furiously to distract you from its sawdust substance.Edwards’ sombre reboot, with Godzilla and co. leaving city- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Set in the months and years after the Libyan revolution, Freedom Fields follows several women aiming to compete in international football. The documentary finds the players excitedly preparing for their first overseas tournament. However, it soon becomes clear that liberation doesn’t equate to freedom, as threats of violence from religious extremists cause the Libyan Football Federation to cancel the trip.It’s clear that British-Libyan filmmaker Naziha Arebi originally planned to follow the women to the tournament, an uplifting tale of competition and sisterhood. Instead, we catch up a year Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a painful and poignant study of character-disintegration, and a triumph for its writer, director and star Jim Cummings. He plays small-town police officer Jim Arnaud, a man trying to do his best while a rising sea of troubles threatens to drown him.Thunder Road is based on Cummings’s original 12-minute film, which won him the Short Film Grand Jury prize at the 2016 Sundance Festival. This provides the material for the opening scene, a daringly extended single shot in which Jim delivers the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. Despite looking pressed and formal in his police uniform, inside Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Booksmart is perfectly scheduled for half term, this high school buddy comedy is guaranteed to tempt youngsters away from their exam revision. It’s fast and funny and packed with squirm-inducing sex gags and a peppy soundtrack. Its heroes are Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Deaver), the class swots who forswore all extra-curricular fun in order to study hard and get into top universities. They are the teens who got fake ID not to go drinking underage but to use the 24-hour library. Molly corrects the punctuation on the graffiti in the toilets Read more ...
graham.rickson
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK. It was run by renowned documentary maker Edgar Anstey and survived until the late 1980s, its intention to promote the virtues of a newly nationalised transport network. The BTF’s output included travelogues and training materials, the more popular Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Haley Fohr’s disquiet at the “wildly outmoded” sexual politics of this notorious 1923 Wilde adaptation led her to cut its intertitles, relying only on sometimes delirious imagery and her throbbing live score. The inherent misogyny of the story of Herod’s step-daughter erotically dancing to gain John the Baptist’s head is, though, already undercut by Alla Nazimova’s bizarrely beautiful version. The Jewish-Russian émigré was a major Broadway and Hollywood star when her uncompromising, ruinously expensive vision for Salomé, and the scandal of her fake marriage to its director Charles Bryant, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It has been ten years since Canadian auteur Xavier Dolan first debuted I Killed My Mother at the Cannes Film Festival. A decade on he returns in competition with a title that shows an evolution of his filmmaking that leaves behind many of the problems of his previous work.Matthias & Maxime is certainly more accessible, and will appeal to mainstream sensibilities as a tenderly rendered examination of male friendship. Thankfully, this feature allows Dolan to step away from the enfant terrible image that has been thrust upon him. It’s altogether more meditative – calmer, even – and all the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s third feature is a beautifully crafted example of the kind of Latin drama that is slow-burn and sensorial, conveying emotion through gestures and looks rather than dialogue or action. Nothing much seems to be happening, but before you know it you’ve been completed sucked in. Prompted by the writer/director’s own childhood on an ecological community outside Santiago, it offers a pithy, bitter-sweet reminder that idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and that children’s needs remain the same wherever they are: parental solidity, love, the freedom Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rocketman opens with its hero in flamboyant stage costume stomping into a drab group therapy session. Pulling the sparkling horns off his magnificent head-dress and shuffling his feathered wings into a seat, Elton John demands of his fellow addicts, ‘How long is this going to take?’ The intimidated counsellor replies, ‘That’s really up to you’. But the answer for the audience is more precise – we’re about to watch two hours of misery memoir intercut with great songs. Rocketman is biopic as drama therapy; its star gets to tell us in detail how his late parents never loved him Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Snowpiercer before it, Bong Joon-ho’s rage-fuelled satire Parasite puts class inequality squarely in its sights. This time however, the story is grounded in the real world and concerns a family of hustlers who will do anything to get by. There are other similarities with his twisted 2013 sci-fi. Joon-Ho’s use of contained spaces once again allows the director to navigate his subject matter very effectively.The film opens in a basement flat, where a young man in his early twenties, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lives with his sister (Park So-dam), mother (Chang Hyae-jin) and father (Song Read more ...