Film
Tom Birchenough
After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fakery is promised in the opening image of The Mercy. A smiling beauty water-skis over sunny seas, only for the camera to pull away and reveal she is part of a maritime expo in a vast exhibition hall. One of the other exhibitors is an inventor called Donald Crowhurst (Colin Firth), who enlists his beaming sons to demonstrate his Navicator, a simple tool to guide sailors on the high seas. Optimism is laced with a tincture of despair. The salesman will turn out to be just as luckless a sailsman.The Crowhurst story is 50 years old, and for the last 30 has absorbed and stimulated writers and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching what remains of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer) serves to remind us just how good his earlier work was. Inferno marked the beginning of the end, its shambolic production beginning Clouzot’s descent into obscurity. But Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s documentary is a treat, the film’s tragicomic history interspersed with archive footage and new dramatisations of key scenes. The hugely anticipated Inferno was started in 1964, four years after Clouzot’s previous film, the Brigitte Bardo-starrer La vérité, which had been a huge box-office success. What was potentially Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the Read more ...
Owen Richards
We follow Kabwita Kasongo on his morning routine, lingering over the shoulder as he treks through the village. A pastel sunrise greets vast landscapes, the morning breeze visible for miles around. He heads to a tree at the edge of a mountain, and begins a day’s work chopping it down. It’s a stunning opening sequence which prepares you for the visceral journey ahead.Kabwita is a charcoal salesman; a gruelling job which consists of chopping down a large tree, cutting it to pieces, burying the pieces, burning them, and then travelling 50 km on foot to sell at them at anywhere between 2,500 to 5, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A perfectionist says goodbye to an art form he has done so much to nourish by playing – you guessed it – a perfectionist. From the minute Daniel Day-Lewis first appears in Phantom Thread, looking sartorially splendid and more aquiline than ever, there's no doubt that the thrice Oscar-winning actor (and a nominee again this year) owns this movie as he has so many previous ones. Playing the wonderfully named Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, a 1950s fashion designer possessed of killer charm and something darker and more unknown as well, the actor cuts a presence at once alluring and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What a gallimaufry! The polymath Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prolific, obsessed and best-known artists in the history; in fact, without qualification, he remains the best-known, for his genius, his mastery of so many media, his public personal life. Not to mention the four museums, the thousands of books and catalogues, the auction records, and the posthumous marketing of his name (both authorised and not) from the Citroen Picasso to coffee mugs. The Mystery of Picasso, remastered for this Arrow Academy release, is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film of Picasso drawing (Clouzot, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t look like a 60-year-old retiree. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt under a dark blue shirt, light brown trousers which descend no further than mid-calf and boots laced high above the ankle he could easily have worn as a young actor in My Beautiful Laundrette. Ditto the earring. He remains as thin and sleek as a whippet. Only the silvery stubble of his hair betrays the march of time.Phantom Thread, he has announced, is to be his last film. After a screening at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he answered questions alongside director Paul Thomas Anderson and co-star Vicky Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Dunkirk and Darkest Hour threatening to storm the Oscars, it seems there’s suddenly plenty of mileage in portraits of the British at war. There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play, Journey’s End, since it debuted on the London stage in 1928 (featuring a young Laurence Olivier), but director Saul Dibb’s new incarnation is a fine testament to the lingering potency of the piece.Its timing is immaculate, since the action depicted took place on the Western Front almost exactly 100 years ago, and later this year we’ll be remembering the 1918 Armistice. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s fascinating to compare this Norwegian film, which despite being Oscar-nominated (it made the Best Foreign Film shortlist of nine, but not the final five) has slipped out without a cinema release in the UK, with Darkest Hour. Set over a crucial few days in April 1940, it’s a parallel story of powerful personalities and their personal and political dilemmas in the face of Germany’s invasion of Europe. But the parallels don’t extend to directorial style; where Joe Wright opted for overly artful set pieces and CGI flourishes in Darkest Hour, for The King’s Choice Erik Poppe adheres to the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This Vietnam vet/road movie is a warm-hearted, meandering piece, but any similarities to Linklater’s Boyhood or the Before…trilogy end there. This is a darker story, but not dark enough, and you wish it could have been less conventional and harder-hitting. Set in 2003, its first scene is in a run-down Virginia bar with Sal, a jaded alcoholic ex-marine (Bryan Cranston in a stand-out performance) at its helm. Doc, a shy former medic from Vietnam days who Sal doesn’t recognise at first (a low-key Steve Carell), re-enters his life, followed by a third ex-marine, Mueller, who was once a hell- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Daphne, the independent feature debut from director Peter Mackie Burns, was released to little fanfare last year, a fact somewhat emphasised by the other films advertised on its DVD release – Moonlight and Lady Macbeth – more lauded releases from distributor Altitude Films. Even the special features fail to commemorate anything but the trailer. But don’t be fooled; Daphne is a hidden gem of British humanist filmmaking.Daphne is a 31-year-old with no direction and very little regard for her wellbeing. Her intelligence and wit give her a magnetism, but it’s soon clear that she’s a useless Read more ...