Film
Mark Kidel
Hannah is a vehicle for Charlotte Rampling, and it's no wonder she won the Best Actress Award for her role at Venice in 2018. The film follows her as she gradually falls to pieces, without a trace of hysteria, slowly and surely, with her husband in prison for reasons that are never clear.Hannah works as a maid in a wealthy household, where she shows tenderness to a slightly disturbed child. She goes to an acting workshop that mirrors, in a strange way, her own increasing alienation, rather than nourishing her soul. There is a leak from the apartment above which she has to deal with. Her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it time for the rebirth of the old-fashioned wartime weepie? If so, this time next year The Aftermath will be dragging a clanking heap of statuettes round Hollywood, attached to the rear bumper of its 1940s army staff car. If not…A cynical person might summarise this movie as Brief Encounter Goes to the Third Reich, in which we find Rachael Morgan (a translucent Keira Knightly) stepping off a train in the bomb-flattened wasteland of Hamburg in late 1945, where she’ll meet her husband, British army colonel Lewis Morgan (stoical Jason Clarke, pictured below with Knightley). It’s a few months Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot uses irony and visual poetry to condemn his nation’s militarism. Twenty months after the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, it opens in the UK trailing a divisive history. When it first emerged in 2017, it was condemned as un-Israeli by then culture minister Miri Regev. She was subsequently barred from the ceremony for the Ophir awards (the Israeli Oscars), at which Foxtrot won eight prizes, including Best Picture.The film was designed as a triptych. The first section focuses on the grief of a well-to-do Tel Aviv couple, Michael and Daphna (Lior Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.Volume Two of the BFI’s monumental and impressive edition of Jarman’s video and film work will add to his status as genius and martyr. This lovingly assembled collection completes a remarkable account of the director’s work with the moving image, an extraordinary oeuvre as he was also writing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The 91st Academy Awards began with a rousing concert appearance from Queen to kick off a show from which Bohemian Rhapsody led the field with four trophies. Three host-free hours later, the ceremony got a surprise shot of adrenaline from the unexpected Oscar that went to The Favourite’s Olivia Colman for playing a queen. What came between was a scattershot affair marked out by numerous Oscar firsts, repeated standing ovations – from that Queen opener to Rami Malek’s prize for playing Freddie Mercury – and a shorter and sometimes sharper Oscars: a good half-hour or more had been shaved from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How does the ever cherub-cheeked Alex Lawther keep getting served in pubs? That question crossed my mind during the more leisurely portions of Old Boys, an overextended English schoolboy revamp of Cyrano de Bergerac that flags just when it most needs narrative adrenaline. Age 23 now but playing someone far younger in the film, Lawther plays a scholarship student called Amberson, who appears to inhabit various pubs with nary a question asked. Audiences, meanwhile, may have questions of their own about how such a promising idea was allowed to dissipate to this degree. The setting is a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s another night in an emergency services dispatch room in Copenhagen. Policeman Asger Holm has been taken off active patrol pending a conduct investigation and is stuck on the phones. Drunks, druggies, posh blokes complaining of being mugged in the red light district, he’s pretty brutal with these time-wasters. Then a call comes in from a desperate woman. She's pretending she’s phoned her child but has been kidnapped by a man who’s driving her to an unknown destination. Can Asger work out where she is, keep her on the line, and get the patrol car to her in time?The Guilty is a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An angry little boy, in jail after stabbing someone, stands in a Beirut courtroom and tells the judge that he wants to sue his parents. Why? For giving birth to him when they’re too poor and feckless to care for him. And he wants them to stop having children.Fair enough. Director/writer Nadine Labaki’s Oscar-nominated third film – it also won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year - is in a different league to her two previous quite jolly features, Caramel and Where do we go now? It is a passionate indictment of the plight of Lebanese street children. Unregistered and without birth certificates Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is an intoxicating cinematic collage-compilation that embraces social history – in microcosm, via its story of the titular Canadian mining town – as well as the history of film itself. But it goes further, too, to achieve something that's close to a meditation on history itself, on time, on the organic process of development and decay. In the 21-minute interview that is the main extra on this Second Run release, Morrison calls it a “window into a time that’s gone”, his phrase capturing nicely the film’s treatment of the four decades or so of North Read more ...
Owen Richards
A British boys boarding school in the 1980s. Not the most obvious setting for a romantic comedy, especially one based on the most famous romcom of all, Cyrano de Bergerac. But for director Toby Macdonald, it was the ideal challenge for his debut feature following the BAFTA-nominated short Heavy Metal Drummer.Old Boys stars Alex Lawther as Amberson, an unpopular squirt of a boy struggling to wade through the school’s various allegiances and sports. Life takes an upturn on the arrival of Agnes (Pauline Etienne), the daughter of the new French teacher. She’s interesting, arty, and quite honestly Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When the world is as crazy as it is right now, its political life dominated by dolts and villains, it needs a new kind of hero. That’s why Americans are embracing an octogenarian woman with more guts and integrity than virtually anyone at her level of public life, and why in quick succession we’ve had two films about her. The Oscar-nominated documentary RBG was released in January and is still available in some cinemas and on streaming platforms. It tells the story of the now 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a remarkable woman who in the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As journalists and critics were enjoying the unseasonably balmy weather in Berlin at the 69th Film Festival, all were wondering – where are all the good films? Surely outgoing festival director Dieter Kosslick would want to conclude his 18-year tenure by going out on a bang? Apparently not.Berlin has never had the glitzy attraction of Cannes or the Oscar-hungry titles of Venice and Toronto. Still, journalists and critics have flocked to the German capital each year. This is because Berlin is a festival where you expect to find challenging, demanding, and revitalising cinema. Cinema that gets Read more ...