Film
Thomas H. Green
Recent years have seen a boom in music documentaries. They are, after all, relatively cheap to make and have a readymade audience. Their narratives are usually similar, and so it is with The Man From Mo’Wax: fame and glory, followed by a fall from grace, followed by self-reflection, absolution and a glimmer of fresh success. What many of them also offer is a sense of wild passion, of the raw, unfettered power of music. This film has little of that. It’s a tale of too-cool-for-school hipsters (at least, that’s how we’d term them now), with the too-cool-for-school-est of them all, Mo’Wax boss Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When a film is about a crime family, audience expectations tend to involve mobsters and thrills, but that’s not the territory that Hirozaku Kora-eda is exploring here. He opens his tale with a camera tracking leisurely across a Tokyo supermarket. A scrawny man and a young boy are picking out supplies to slip into their bags and take home. There’s very little drama in their thieving, it’s an everyday necessity that they’ve honed into a routine. Kora-eda isn’t going for high tension, there’s just a pause in the subtle jazz-infused soundtrack that allows us to listen to the rustle of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The enthronement of Claire Foy has been quite a spectacle. Perhaps some of Her Majesty’s mystique has rubbed off, as she is now entering that territory known to few young actors, where you’ll happily pay to see her in anything. Should that policy extend to her newest incarnation?In The Girl in the Spider’s Web Foy becomes the latest actress to give her Lisbeth Salander, the super-damaged Swedish gender-neutral vigilante boffin. First off it was Noomi Rapace, then Rooney Mara. Now Foy wears the tats, the piercings, the leathers and the semi-shorn side-crop and steps astride a throbbing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) was, for many years, his best-known film in the West, dubbed into English three years after its 1958 premiere as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne by an enterprising Hollywood producer. Both versions are included on Second Run’s release, and it’s striking that the English version retains most of the original’s charms. Zeman’s Baron Munchausen is a colourful romp, but the monochrome Invention for Destruction is a better work, its eye-popping visuals here serving a semblance of plot.Zeman based his plot on Verne’s novel Facing the Flag, a Read more ...
Tom Baily
It is appropriate that Keanu Reeves sounds especially croaky and muffled throughout Siberia. Business meetings for his character Lucas Hill (a diamond trader) don’t normally involve much talk, just a swift briefcase handover and a confidential handshake. He is forced to get engaged, however, when his partner Pyotr (Boris Gulyarin) disappears, forcing him to travel to Russia to meet with the clients and track down his colleague. Hill (and you can’t help but thinking Keanu Reeves, too) doesn’t seem pleased with either: the acting, or the talking.In St Petersburg, Hill is given two days to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Two years after the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we return to the Wizarding World once again for the next, somewhat convoluted, chapter in the five planned prequel instalments, with Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Eddie Redmayne reprises his role as the bashful but brilliant Magizoologist, Newt Scamander (pictured below), joined by muggle-baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), and witches Tina (Katherine Waterston) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol). Leaving New York, the quartet from the first film travel to a jazz-age Paris on the hunt for the troubled Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like Ken Loach and the Dardennes brothers, Laurent Cantet is a filmmaker with a keen interest in social issues and themes, often using non-professional actors and a naturalistic approach, but perfectly willing to inject a little plot contrivance to spice things up.The Frenchman’s early, calling-card films dealt with the workplace: Human Resources (1999) tackled industrial relations in a provincial factory and the divisive effect it has on a father-son relationship; Time Out (2001) concerned an executive’s painstaking attempt to fabricate a glamourous new working life Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The first Suspiria was a sensation, and spectacularly, monomaniacally new. Its young heroine Susie Bannon’s ride from an innately hostile airport through eldritch woods in which a panicked girl ran from her destination, the Markos Academy of Dance, as Goblin’s rock score gibbered and pounded at the senses, was hysterical, relentless film-making. In 1977, Dario Argento had daubed the giallo thriller tradition lurid red, offering ultimate horror.Luca Guadagnino will not be rushed. His Suspiria is long, slow, sometimes torpid and diffuse. His 1977 is a resonant historical period, in which winter Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Steve McQueen’s progress from video artist to Oscar-winning director has been deceptively smooth. The chasm between Bobby Sands’ emaciated martyrdom in his feature debut, Hunger (2008), and a star-packed heist film seems still greater. His radical concerns inform Widows, which is set in an America only partly freed from 12 Years a Slave’s racial purgatory. But it lets him slip off his hair-shirt, and play in the genre fields he also loves. Four films in, we don’t yet fully know what kind of film-maker Steve McQueen is.Lynda La Plante’s fondly remembered ITV series Widows, adapted by McQueen Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The trailer for Overlord promises havoc, horror, evil, madness, terror and rage, and to be fair it delivers on most of those. From the fantasy factory of producer JJ Abrams, it’s the ghastly story of an alternative D-Day, in which American paratroopers drop into Normandy only to discover that the Nazis are working on appalling Frankenstein-esque experiments to bring about their “thousand-year Reich”.This isn’t a mega-budget film, but thanks to some ingenious special effects and computerised assistance, it roars out of the screen like a monster truck on a Jack Daniel’s bender. One of the most Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s insidiously seductive celebrations of Nazism and the propaganda excesses of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940), the films that were made in Germany during the Hitler period have been air-brushed out of cinema history, almost in mirror image of the culture that was entartet, or banned by the Nazis themselves. There is something repulsive about cinema that was micro-managed by “Dr” Goebbels, in most cases served the regime rather than questioned it, and during the war provided increasingly fantasy-driven escapism to soothe both the women left behind and the troops at the Read more ...