Film
Tom Birchenough
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore). Festival victories aside, at first sight the two films could hardly seem more different.In the second film Olmi moved into distinctly new territory for him: Legend was an adaptation (of the 1939 novella by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth), featured professional actors (Rutger Hauer in the lead role), was made in English, and counts as a fable, very different in style from Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Breathing through an oxygen mask with a busted diaphragm and rib after shooting a single scene in mother!, Jennifer Lawrence had rarely suffered more for her art. Nor have we. Darren Aronofsky's latest begins as an enjoyably enigmatic, Polanskiesque waking nightmare, as the Mother (Lawrence) and her beloved Poet (Javier Bardem) find creepy strangers barging into their happy home. It ends in ineffectual, flailing chaos.The blurring of mythic dreams with supposed reality begins in the first minutes, as a fire-razed mansion reconstitutes itself around Lawrence as she sleeps. Big close-ups and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench Read more ...
graham.rickson
Describe the plot of My Life as a Courgette to someone who’s not been lucky enough to see it and they'll find it hard to understand how a film with such a bleak premise can be so funny and emotionally involving. Swiss director Claude Barras’s magical little animation is an extraordinary thing, and a miracle of concise, clear storytelling.Based on a French children's novel, it tells the story of nine-year old Icare. Nicknamed "Courgette", he’s living in a children's home after inadvertently causing the death of his alcoholic mother. The brutal details of why he's sent there aren't dodged by Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Hot on the heels of his furiously original sci-fi noir, Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich cranked out this film adaptation of Clifford Odets’s tortured play about tortured artists in venal Hollywood. The Big Knife doesn’t wholly escape its stage origins – most of the action takes place in one Bel Air living room – but Aldrich makes the most of his camera angles and wrings considerable dynamic energy from his cast.Jack Palance plays Charlie Castle, a charismatic movie star living a life of luxury. We meet him boxing in the back yard of his palatial Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It doesn’t take long, I think, to work out the associations of the title of Insyriated: we are surely being presented with a variation of “incarceration”, one tinged by the very specific context of the conflict that has ravaged Syria for six years now. But there’s a certain ambiguity at the centre of Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw’s film about a Damascus family confined in their apartment as civil war goes on around them – they have not been literally locked up by anyone, rather their temporary self-confinement, presided over and enforced by the powerful matriarch Oum Yazan (Hiam Abbass Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stephen King’s IT attempted ultimate terror, cutting far deeper than a killer clown. It idealised childhood friendships and their adult honouring even as one of those kids was forced to eat shit by sadistic bullies, and their idyllic small-town of Derry had a stream of child-killing evil running through its sewers. Andy Muschietti’s elegantly crafted adaptation – the first part of two – does King’s achievement superficial justice, while rarely causing nightmares of its own.Its opening scene is one exception, as 12-year-old Bill (Jaden Lieberher, pictured below third right) sends his adoring 7 Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a timely rerelease of the 1963 version of the William Golding novel, coinciding as it does with the debate about a planned remake with an all-female cast. Peter Brook’s adaptation sticks closely to the original text: according to a fascinating interview with editor/cameramen Gerard Feil that features as an extra here, there was no script as such. Rather the director would read the book with the cast in the evening, work out the dialogue for the next day, and shoot the resulting scenes with several cameras.It’s a striking technique, not quite cinema verité or improvisational drama Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add Una to the ever-lengthening list of mediocre films adapted from fine plays. In London and New York, David Harrower’s Blackbird was an entirely harrowing two-hander: a symbiotic portrait of the damage wrought by desire that also happened to function as a first-class vehicle for actors as disparate as Roger Allam and Jodhi May (in the West End) and Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill (in New York, where Pill was several years later replaced for a commercial run by Michelle Williams).But in translating for the screen a play he had directed onstage in Germany in 2005, film neophyte Benedict Andrews Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Jean Grémillon's final fiction film The Love of a Woman, Marie Prieur (Micheline Presle) arrives on the Breton island of Ushant to replace the tiny settlement's aging Dr Morel (Robert Naly). While showing Marie her new digs and surgery, Mme Morel (Madeleine Geoffroy) compliments the lady doctor on her youth. Marie sighingly replies that she is 28. Quel horreur!Ninety-five now, Presle was 31 when the film was released in France in 1953. It is no discourtesy to say she looked closer to 35 – Marie is an attractive, dignified woman who performs her work with a quietness and authority that Read more ...