Film
Owen Richards
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management. Across its runtime, the documentary answers this in no uncertain terms: this is who she’s always been, and mainstream success is a by-product of her unflinching, challenging nature. It builds a compelling picture of one of music’s most singular stars.Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (titled after her birth name, anglicised nickname and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Animation fans have rarely had it so good, though it’s nothing short of criminal that the mean-spirited, infantile Peter Rabbit took more money than the sublime Paddington 2, and that Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner wasn’t a popular success when released earlier this year. Redress the balance, and buy this disc today. Based on the first novel in Deborah Ellis’s Afghanistan-set series, it’s a remarkable film, at times so real, so acutely observed, that you forget it’s animated at all – as with My Life as a Courgette, you’re left incredulous that this riveting assemblage of pixels and pencil Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as Read more ...
James Graham
Thank you. It’s an honour to have been asked to speak here today. Although looking at the h100 List this year, I’ve no idea why I’m presumptuously standing here; given the talent, creativity and achievements far surpassing my own within this room. But I’m also excited, and genuinely inspired, to be part of such a group.I don’t know about you, but I find working in the arts often seriously discombobulating in either being a far-too-lonely and private endeavour one minute; an overwhelming public and intensely populated one the next.Those days where the only human contact you have is with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. When in Never Here New York conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) finds a stranger’s phone, she uses it as the basis for her next art show, tracking down and interviewing the owner’s contacts, listening to his music and using his GPS history to retrace his steps. She lives in a private bubble of self-regard, and is shocked when her subject is hurt and angered by her crass exploitation of his privacy. “You’ve done a bad thing,” he tells her at the show’s launch party.Miranda comes out with fatuous nuggets of pseudobabble like “circumstances Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star player to come out as gay while continuing to play at the top of the game, is no secret. Two decades on from the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the destructive consequences are all too well known; recent fictional reminders, such as John Donnelly’s The Pass (made into an accomplished film by Ben A Williams two years ago), suggest that little has changed. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a father-son relationship lies in understanding the full nuance of its title. The word wajib, best translated from Arabic as “social duty”, is spoken only once in the film – an invitation is taken to an old lady whom the hosts know will be unable to attend, but they offer it because that is the accepted, the proper way in their society – but its concept pervades the entire film.Jacir has located her story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Harry Dean Stanton died in September last year aged 91, and will forever be remembered as the embodiment of the lean, lonely, laconic stranger, a man of few words but imbued with an enigmatic allure. This film, the directorial debut of character actor John Carroll Lynch, has been conceived as both homage to and starring vehicle for the departed Stanton, but doesn’t quite hit the spot on either count.Harry D is the eponymous Lucky, a solitary 90-something living on the edge of a sleepy, sun-baked town in the Arizona desert and trying to understand what his life has meant. Displaying a heroic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Life has sped up so, so much in the 82 years since My Man Godfrey appeared. The narrative pacing of many Hollywood films from that era seems painfully slow to modern viewers. My Man Godfrey, on the other hand, watched here in the company of a 15-year-old, has not lost a jot of its wild pacing, or indeed its zany vitality and arch commentary on economic disparity (the latter especially welcome as society increasingly gears itself towards ensuring the rich become more so while the rest of us flail).It was a big hit at the time, nominated for six Oscars, including all the acting ones (although Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fenella Fielding - “one of the finest female impersonators in the business,” joked Eric Morecambe – has died at the age of 90. Most actors of such a great vintage tend to be forgotten, but not Fielding. Last year she celebrated her big birthday with a memoir. Its alluring title Do You Mind If I Smoke? was lifted from that succulent scene in Carry On Screaming! Playing a femme fatale draped on a divan, Fielding seemed to exude sultry clouds of steam from her very pores.The memoir brought her a great deal of publicity. She did book events, she read the readers’ news on Radio 4’s PM, she was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Few things divide opinion as much as comedy, and we’ve all had the experience of sitting through a film stony-faced while all around collapse with mirth. What tickles you? Erudite Wildean wordplay, or the simple joys of watching a fat bloke fall over? The genius of Mel Brooks’ 1967 incarnation of The Producers is that it ticks so many boxes. There’s something to please (and offend) everyone. The set-up should by now be familiar: has-been Broadway producer teams up with naïve accountant to produce a show so terrible that it will close on opening night, allowing them to flee with the oversold Read more ...
Steven Eastwood
Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. Dying remains taboo. We don’t talk about dying, we don’t teach it in schools, and yet this event is as natural and everyday as birth. Having been one of the central subjects for art for a millennium or more, death has come to be one of the least broached. The images we have are medicalised or euphemistic. All of the beauty, grace and candour of death visible in classical painting is gone. So too is the representation of our very creatureliness, that Read more ...