Film
Matt Wolf
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut keeps you guessing on matters of culpability right through to the closing exchange. But one can't help but feel in places that less would be more, however pleased one is to clock the continued career ascent of its leading players. The near-ubiquitous Buckley plays the novelistically-named Moll, who has a job as a tour guide that she loathes and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of South African director John Trengove’s powerful first feature works in more ways than one. In its literal sense, it alludes to the ritual circumcision, or ukwaluka, that accompanies the traditional rite of passage for young Xhosa men, and the process of healing that follows. It’s a process that sees teenage “initiates” symbolically inducted into adulthood by older men, or “care-givers”, who have themselves previously been through the experience that they now oversee.Traditionally shrouded in secrecy, descriptions of ukwaluka are rare, the best-known that in Nelson Mandela’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical. The work’s stage origins are clear; apart from the newly-written prologue and epilogue, this is predominantly a solemn, talky affair, shot mostly on a studio lot. Though we begin with an exterior shot of a sergeant and a WAAF sat on a hillside overlooking an industrial town, discussing what post-war British society might look like. Priestley himself strolls past and asks for a match, before joining in with the couple’s Read more ...
Owen Richards
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him, death is nothing compared to the heavy conscience he would carry by doing nothing.The Deminer is an extraordinary insight into the life of Major Fakhir, compiled from around 50 hours of amateur footage. Armed with little more than a pair of wire cutters and a knife, Fakhir tackles a variety of bombs with worrying abandon: he hacks around landmines Read more ...
David Nice
The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times. But Ingmar Bergman's first major film made without the safety net of the Swedish film industry in 1970 has enough serious-minded authenticity to mark it out as more than the total failure he tersely labelled it in his memoirs.Typically, it swerves away from the stereotypical premise: a brisk, chic housewife and hostess in a happy marriage sleepwalks into an affair with a troubled soul, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a serious film to be made about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is not that film. The absolute gobful of a title more than hints at artery-furring whimsy. Its provenance is explained in the opening sequence when, after dark on the island in 1941, a tipsy, bucolic crew of Guernsey residents are apprehended for breaking the Wehrmacht's curfew. They explain that they have convened to discuss literature in a book club for which they instantly extemporise a name. In truth, they’ve been gleefully glugging home-brewed gin while Read more ...
David Nice
Opera on film's most magical offering, better by some way than Joseph Losey's cinematically tricksy Don Giovanni, at last makes it to Region 2 in this BFI dual-format release. I've watched Ingmar Bergman's sublime response to Mozart many times, and played scenes to students, in the Criterion Collection edition, but here it is, easily seen in the UK, all spruced up and ready to delight a new generation of kids as well as adults who still don't know it.I disagree with Sameer Rahim's booklet essay that there is nothing of the "dark retelling" about it; once past the "family of man" audience Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s about time Juliette Binoche and Claire Denis teamed up: the legendary French actress, Gallic film royalty known by her countrymen and women as La Binoche, with one of the country’s most unique directors, both talented and formidable women who have very much forged their own paths in the cutthroat world of the film industry.Just like waiting for a bus, there are now two collaborations between them, made in quick succession: the second, a science fiction co-starring Robert Pattinson, is in post-production. The Arts Desk met Binoche in Paris to speak about the first.Let the Sunshine In has Read more ...
Veronica Lee
One of the joys of writing about comedy over the past few years is the decreasing frequency with which I am asked to comment on “women in comedy”, “female comics” or, most egregiously, “are women funny?” I think we can all agree that you're either funny or you're not, no matter which gonads you carry around. So it's interesting to see Funny Cow taking us back to a time – the 1970s – when female comics would be booed off stage.Maxine Peake is Funny Cow, a Northern working-class woman whose life is aimlessly drifting along until she sees the washed-up comic Lenny (Alun Armstrong) performing in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The second thing I noticed about Miloš Forman, who has died at the age of 86, was the spectacular imperfection of his English. All those decades in America could not muffle his foghorn of a Bohemian accent, nor assimilate the refugees from Czech syntax. The first thing was the heavy Cuban perfume that announced his proximity. It's a wonder America, almost as Stalinist about public smoking as his native Czechoslovakia once was about public speaking, never booted him out.He torched another reeking missile as he told of an English friend visiting New York "who hadn't been for several years, and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Andrey Zvyagintsev is without doubt one of the great film-makers of our time. If you only know Leviathan, it's about time you looked at the rest of his considerable oeuvre. What is it about Russian cinema? Since the 1920s, Russia has brought us a succession of directors who have combined story-telling with extraordinary imagery and unique spiritual depth. Russian film explores the human abyss with the same ruthless and forensic devotion displayed by the country’s great novelists and poets. It’s as if a culture nurtured on the numinous power of the icon recognised the intrinsic power of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
George Orwell’s maxim that sport is war minus the shooting never loses its currency. This summer it may acquire more when the football squads of the pampered west head for Russia. Historically, it applies to a small sub-genre of films about the British Empire. Lagaan, whose title unpromisingly translates as “tax”, was a stirring story of the Indian servants taking on and beaten the occupiers of their country. The South African film Blood & Glory – it too sounds better as Modder En Bloed – does a similar job with rugby. It tells of a mostly fictional game between Boer prisoners of war and Read more ...