Film
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.But what otherwise Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"It's the same old story, told over and over forever": So remarks the redoubtable Sam Elliott late in the most recent reboot of A Star is Born, which itself manages to take an oft-told story and reinvent it very much afresh. As the grizzled sage who happens to be the older brother to the self-sabotaging rocker played for keeps by the film's director Bradley Cooper, Elliott in a sentence gives voice to the eternal appeal of this intersecting narrative, about one artist (Lady Gaga's waitress-turned-vocal wonderwoman, in this instance) who is catapulted to film even as the other flames out in a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Slovak director Štefan Uher is often acclaimed as the figure who initiated the movement that came to be known as the Czech New Wave with his 1962 work, The Sun in a Net. While that film certainly had a style, both visual and narrative, that was original for its time, Uher would continue to stretch other boundaries over the few years in which the New Wave lasted, not least in his 1966 The Miraculous Virgin (Panna zázra nica).For, as well as pushing the social boundaries of what was acceptable in cinema for which it would become better known, the new political circumstances also ushered in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main picture) and ideas pour out faster than she can realise them, even though she works all day, six days a week. She must be the most prolific artist alive; she is also one of the most popular. People queue for hours to gain entry to her exhibitions and last year she opened her own five-storey gallery in Tokyo. The main draw are the infinity Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The straw hat is surely the season’s requisite headgear for great actors embarking on their valedictory screen performances. It was there on the venerable Harry Dean Stanton’s head through much of Lucky, and the great John Hurt makes it his own in Eric Styles’ That Good Night, his last lead film role (his cameo in espionage thriller Damascus Cover hardly counts). As its title, drawn from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem about death, suggests, the whiff of mortality is strong, and so is the sense of a script creaking, dramatic impact sustained principally by the charisma of a master.“The horizon Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Writers need to write, or so goes the unimpeachable argument that underpins The Wife, which is being strongly touted as the film that may finally bring leading lady Glenn Close an Oscar in her seventh time at bat. Close is terrific, as she almost always is, but this film from Swedish director Björn Runge is in no way her match, and it would be a shame if the Academy were to honour the screen (and stage) veteran for purely sentimental reasons, having bypassed her in far-superior movies along the way. The source is a novel by the American writer Meg Wolitzer, but much of The Wife Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park.Crystal Moselle’s first feature film (her extraordinary 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, about some Lower East Side siblings whose father closeted them in the family apartment for years, is a hard act to follow) homes in on eight teenage girls who bond through skateboarding. Very different Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much has been made of Iceman’s characters speaking the ancient Rhaetic dialect, unsubtitled, but that’s never a problem: Felix Randau’s no-frills revenge thriller doesn’t need any words. The juiciest bits of dialogue are the various grunts and shrieks uttered by the protagonist Kelab (Juergen Vogel). His outbursts are something else: pained, guttural explosions of rage and terror – if there was a prize for best shouting in a film, Vogel would be a shoo-in. Kelab is based on Ötzi, the "Tyrolean iceman", whose frozen, mummified body was uncovered by a pair of German tourists in 1991: Iceman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Domnhall Gleeson needs to watch it. In Goodbye Christopher Robin he played AA Milne, the creator of Pooh and co. To achieve the correct level of period English PTSD, it was as if he’d folded himself up into a neat pile of desiccated twigs. And now he’s gone and done it again in The Little Stranger, only more so.In an adaptation of the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters he plays Faraday, a quiet Warwickshire doctor with a trim little moustache who is drawn into the chaotic lives of the Ayres family up at Hundreds Hall, the crumbling old pile where his mother used to be a servant before the First World Read more ...