Film
Adam Sweeting
First introduced into the burgeoning “Marvel Cinematic Universe” in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man is another triumph for this exuberant franchise (even if some might feel a pang for the fine and still-recent pairing of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone under director Marc Webb's helmsmanship). What the Marvel flicks have got, and their DC Comics rivals conspicuously haven’t, is a capacity for bringing some wit and a lightness of touch to their stories, no matter how much computerised spectacle is exploding all around.Holland, previously on the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Baby drives like a deranged bullet. Edgar Wright’s “diegetic action-musical” choreographs the bank-heist getaways of angel-faced Baby (Ansel Elgort) as physically exhilarating pure cinema, a rush that’s rare. It’s also pure, adrenalin-pumping rock’n’roll, a combination built into the plot: Baby can only drive so long as his tinnitus-drowning cassette mix-tapes play, giving him the rhythm and focus he needs. Doc (a lugubrious Kevin Spacey) is the boss he owes, who keeps his pedal reluctantly to the metal, never quite reaching the promised last job, and forced to work with increasingly violent Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julian Assange’s white hair marks his public persona. To some he’s an unmistakably branded outsider, or a lone white wolf hunting global injustice. Hollywood would cast him as the coolly enigmatic superhero who’s revealed as the supervillain in the last reel. Laura Poitras’ Risk shows him as a slippery character in his own spy film, dying those famous locks brown as he alters his appearance under his adoring mother's gaze, before making a Bourne-like motorbike getaway under the authorities’ noses, to become a cramped citizen of Ecuador.Poitras’ extreme access films several such pivotal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is meat murder? Will people eat anything if it’s cheap? Is the taste of bacon really what stops us half the western world turning vegetarian? Okja is a commercial stretch, a partly subtitled children’s fable from South Korea which unstintingly confronts all of these deep moral questions. But it does so in the most – if you will – palatable manner. After the briefest release in the cinema, it makes the short on-trend transition to a streaming service, and it’s on Netflix that it should be consumed by anyone and everyone with a strong enough stomach to enjoy an enchanting adventure with a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944. The resulting film calmly eviscerated the legend that the French had resisted the Nazi regime and presents a far more complex history of collaboration, compromise and collusion.Initially conceived for French television, the documentary was withheld from broadcast in France in 1969 and caused a storm when it opened Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle Huppert isn’t just here for the nasty things in life. Her rape non-victim in Elle was one of the most iconoclastic performances even she’s given, enigmatic yet emotionally rich, rooted and moving. She won’t get nearly as much attention for her role here as Liliane, a singer who came second to Abba at Eurovision, who’s lured out of an anonymous retirement by a besotted, 21-year-old boxer who becomes her lover and manager. Souvenir is an unashamedly breezy romcom, full of gauzy romance, wish-fulfilment, a great faux-Eurovision soundtrack by Pink Martini, and a May-December romance that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a movie as staggeringly awful as The Book of Henry. If it was just a touch more shrill it could have qualified as a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic, but unfortunately it teeters this side of tasteful in order to keep its 12 rating. How any studio executive ever read Gregg Hurwitz’s script and thought this was a viable scenario is truly baffling. What terrible atonement for sins in a past life led Naomi Watts to take the lead is another mystery, as is the question of how director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) is going to live this debacle down and go on Read more ...
graham.rickson
F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London. Born in Islington in 1880, he joined the Quekett Microscopical Club as a teenager, all the better to pursue a healthy interest in “those members of the animal kingdom which have been for one reason or another neglected.” Initially, Smith used his microscope to create exquisite glass slides, moving into film making at the behest of Charles Urban, the influential producer of 1903’s still terrifying Cheese Mites short.Several of Smith’s early films feature on this BFI Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Do the makers of the essentially unnecessary Hampstead have a secret vendetta against north London and its citizenry? The thought occurred to me midway through Joel Hopkins's wannabe romcom, which places the ever-charming Diane Keaton smack dab in the sylvan byways of NW3, only to surround her with a ceaselessly toxic array of locals that no amount of lunches at Villa Bianca could ever put right.Sure, the Heath is great (I've lived on a street adjacent to it for years), and one is indeed likely to run into Simon Callow now and again, as happens here. But even the briefest of time in the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we Read more ...