Film
Matt Wolf
Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board. By that I don't mean yet further devotion to an already-painstaking emphasis on visuals that attempt to recreate the artist's own palette in filmmaking terms. The fact is, no amount of eye-catching amplitude can overcome consistently tin-eared writing, and by the point someone posed the onscreen question, "Did you know he was a genius?", I was primed to drain my own face of Read more ...
graham.rickson
There are two elephants in Blake Edwards’ 1968 comedy The Party. One appears literally at the film’s climax, emblazoned with graffiti. More significant, and troubling, is the metaphorical elephant in the room: that we’re invited to laugh at a white comedian in brownface.Namely Peter Sellers, impersonating an Indian actor who unwittingly wrecks an upmarket Hollywood shindig. His Hrundi V Bakshi is almost a retread of the character he played opposite Sophia Loren in 1960’s The Millionairess. Still, according to a talking head interviewed in one of the bonus features, the film “was very popular Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in bookshops with their fat spines in flashing yellow upper case, but until now he's been kept from the screen. Michael Fassbender feels like correct casting, a loping, freaky lunk who can embody obsession and self-loathing.In The Snowman, we first encounter Hole waking up on a public bench with a hangover from hell. He has an ex-girlfriend Rakel ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran Samurai haunted by the cruel murder of his sister Machi, but saved from death himself by the “bloodworms” which were fed to him by a mysterious veiled crone and have rendered him immortal. If he loses a hand or is hacked by a sword, the worms speedily patch him up again.Fifty years after Machi’s death, Manji embarks on a new quest to avenge the murder Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Fish out of water come in various guises in Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fable, shown at London Film Festival. The Shape of Water riffs on The Creature from the Black Lagoon with its amphibious man-god, captured in 1962 to be cattle-prodded and dissected by the film’s real monster, US agent Strickland (Michael Shannon). Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at Strickland’s Area 51-style facility, her ageing, failing gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), black fellow cleaner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Soviet double-agent Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) are also feeling the American outsider Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to one of the great American films of the Seventies, shown at London Film Festival, stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as old Vietnam buddies reunited as America is embroiled in another futile war, in Iraq. On paper, it’s a timely and enticing prospect. Yet it’s not the impactful film it could have been.Directed by Hal Ashby, with Jack Nicholson in the spectacular early phase of his career, The Last Detail followed two Navy lifers as they escorted a younger seaman to military prison – determined to give him a good time on the way.It Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the most famous scene in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve’s resplendently blonde Séverine fantasises being tied to the wooden frame of a crude outdoor eating space. There she is pelted with mud by her surgeon husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) and his friend Husson (Michel Piccoli), an older roué she hates but to whom she is perversely attracted.A herd of cows is nearby and the black mud is likely mixed with their shit. Before throwing the ordure and calling Séverine filthy names, the two men discuss the time of day, which is between 2 and 5 pm. These are the hours the 23-year-old Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time, shown at London Film Festival, a wild ride. An unrecognisable Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery. The heist goes horribly wrong and the camera clings to the brothers’ and their nightmarish fate over the next 24 hours. Directed by real life brothers Josh and Benny Safdie (the latter also plays Nick), Good Time is a homage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play since it debuted on the London stage in 1928, but Saul Dibb’s new incarnation, shown at London Film Festival, is testament to the lingering potency of the piece. Armed with a taut, uncluttered screenplay by Simon Reade and a splendid group of actors, Dibb evokes the terror and misery of the trenches without lapsing into preachiness or sentimentality.Front and centre is Sam Claflin as Captain Stanhope, the much-admired commanding officer of an infantry company waiting nervously for an expected German onslaught. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit Read more ...
Matt Wolf
People who live in glass castles might be wary of throwing stones. That clearly was not the case with American magazine journalist Jeannette Walls, who made of her often harrowing childhood a best-selling memoir that has found its inevitable way to the screen. A would-be Daddy Dearest with a hefty dollop of Captain Fantastic thrown into the mix, what would seem to be a star vehicle for recent Oscar winner Brie Larson is in fact pretty much dominated by Woody Harrelson as the fearsome paterfamilias who lashes out and loves in equal measure. Or does the first as a perverse way of expressing the Read more ...