Film
Saskia Baron
Nick Park’s utterly charming new animation channels the spirits of so many cinema and comedy ghosts that its originality can be overlooked – but it shouldn’t be. This is a fresh narrative in an era where films aimed at young audiences are dominated by sequels, prequels, remakes, comic book and TV adaptations, and it is all the better for it. The in-jokes and references come thick and fast and it’s fun spotting them. From the outset there’s a homage to Douglas Adams and the Pythons; we may be in the primordial soup but captions tell us we’re near Manchester, around lunchtime. Meanwhile two Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alexander Payne’s best-loved film is Sideways but that title may as well work for everything and anything in his oeuvre. In Election, About Schmidt, The Descendants and Nebraska, he puts America and Americans under the microscope from a variety of quizzically oblique angles. There’s another tilt shift in his latest satire. Downsizing inspects national attitudes literally de haut en bas as Payne imagines a utopian community of people who after undering a process of elective diminution are, to be specific, 0.0634 percent of their previous body mass and volume.The idea, developed in response to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Adapted by Raymond Briggs from his best-selling graphic novel, When the Wind Blows was released in 1986 and stands up so well that you’re inclined to forgive its flaws: namely David Bowie’s leaden theme song and an abundance of fairly flat black humour. Though, in hindsight, Jimmy T Murakami’s deadpan, quasi-realist look at nuclear Armageddon as it befalls an elderly working class British couple shouldn’t be amusing.As with all the best animated features, the storytelling grips to the extent that you forget that you’re not watching a flesh-and-blood cast. Not that there’s much story, other Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Jeremy Irons – Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, an Oscar winner as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, not forgetting the lordly larynx of Scar in The Lion King – arrived at the theatre’s drama school in 1969 and in due course joined the company. The role that called him back was just about the biggest one going: James Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey into Night.Eugene O’Neill’s monster play tells of a titanic family implosion in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, and immediately marked the Lusaka-born, Wales-raised director down as a figure to watch. Putting her film into any category is more challenging, though, with its elements of fable and somewhat surreal satire, although “surreal” and any associated hints of the absurd risk saying more about the perspective of the observer than the world Nyoni herself depicts.But however you look at it, I Am Not a Witch is a startling, vibrant piece of filmmaking. Over a spare 90 minutes Nyoni follows her nine-year-old Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
"The Times They Are A-Changin'" has never sounded so menacing. The Brothers & Sisters’ gospel version accompanies the end credits of The Final Year documentary as we watch the stunned UN ambassador Samantha Power unpinning her son’s drawings from her office wall and moving out of the White House on the day before Trump’s inauguration.It’s only towards this grisly end that director Greg Barker’s film gathers momentum. It starts with a promise of intimacy – Power getting her bouncy kids ready for school, secretary of state John Kerry forgetting his cell phone before he’s driven off in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nobody is more sensitive about the notion of becoming a geriatric action hero than Liam Neeson (“guys, I’m sixty-fucking-five,” as he points out), but he can still punch bad guys and leap off moving trains with the best of ‘em. In this latest battle against the odds while the clock ticks down, Neeson is insurance salesman Michael McCauley, who commutes into Manhattan every day. Except he won’t any more, because he just got sacked.Before this calamity befalls him, director Jaume Collet-Sera (who also collaborated with Neeson on Run All Night, Unknown and Non-Stop) has some fun with the daily Read more ...
Owen Richards
Hounds of Love is the latest in a long line of small-budget Australian horrors “based on true events” – it must be something about the heat. However, stellar performances and a refreshing depth in characterisation make this thriller stand apart from its genre mates.On paper, Hounds of Love sounds grimly formulaic: sociopaths John and Evie White abduct a young girl from the streets of Perth, chain her to a bed and perform gruesome acts on their new plaything. But where lesser films would find twisted thrills in torture, first time director/writer Ben Young instead draws tension from the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dario Argento’s Suspiria was confirmed as one of horror’s great fever dreams on its 40th anniversary re-release last year. The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Phenomena (1985) are lesser book-ends of the director’s peak period, when his global genre influence was vast.The Cat o’ Nine Tails (★★★) is pure Italian giallo, inserting lurid sex and violence and weird narrative elements till its crime tale twists towards horror. Karl Malden is a wonderfully muscular presence as a blind ex-newspaper photographer living in happy mutual dependence with his young niece, and thrusting through life with the Read more ...
Owen Richards
A Woman’s Life first premiered at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival, alongside the likes of La La Land, Arrival and Jackie. Though it’s taken longer to get to our shores than its contemporaries, the film feels fresh and relevant. This immensely personal character study is at times dense, but subtly effective.Jeanne is the pleasant and idealistic daughter of Baron Perthuis de Vauds. She lives with her father and mother at a serene chateau in 19th century Normandy, passing the days gardening, drawing and playing games. She is introduced to the newly arrived Viscount Julien, and love Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Great Man theory of history is applied by Darkest Hour director Joe Wright to his star Gary Oldman as much as their subject Winston Churchill. Oldman’s performance is the sole, sufficient reason to see a film in which little else finally lingers. Kajuhiro Tsuji’s prosthetics allow his physical transformation into a jowly 65-year-old. Oldman’s vocal rhythm and tone then let the icon breathe. He is hesitant, breathless, uncertain. More than mercurial, his volcanic passion boils over in panicked rushes.“Which self shall I be today?” Anthony McCarten’s script has Churchill say. “My emotions Read more ...