Film
Nick Hasted
It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D. Salinger-like William Forrester, who wrote a generation-defining novel, but now lives as a secretive recluse in a locked Bronx apartment. This Oscar-winning role joins Playing By Heart (1998) in reviving Connery’s range, away from the wry old-time Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more. Director Olivier Assayas reunites with Kristen Stewart from Clouds of Sils Maria and again, she’s playing an assistant to a celebrity/actress. This time she plays Maureen, a personal shopper, picking out couture outfits and Cartier jewellery for her boss’s various glamorous appearances, skittering between the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The curious thing about Reset, the documentary that tracks the making of a new ballet by Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opera Ballet, is that it clearly had another agenda. Millepied, a Frenchman nicely named for his profession, was a left-field appointment as director of the 335-year-old institution in 2014. He lasted only two years, but that in itself is hardly a story given the number of his predecessors whose tenure was even shorter.The film was shot over a period of weeks during the same season that saw Millepied quit, yet reveals no serious friction. Okay, so the 36-year-old breezes Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this Beauty and the Beast as a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/ Read more ...
graham.rickson
The creative, organisational and intellectual properties of slime mould are outlined in loving detail in Tim Grabham and Jason Sharp’s engaging documentary The Creeping Garden, though even this peculiar organism seems a little colourless when compared to the folks getting excited about it. Like the engaging amateur mycologist seen foraging in the Oxfordshire woods, for whom slime moulds are “a sideline”: Mark’s enthusiasm is so infectious that it’s hard not to get excited when he finds some, a mass of tiny yellow spheres buried in the soil.Long dismissed as just another fungus, its unique Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming Oscar-winner Emma Stone might secretly admit that perhaps the wrong woman won on the night.But it has to be admitted that Elle (adapted by screenwriter David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel “Oh...”) could never be mistaken for a Hollywood production. A perplexing but electrifying mixture of sexual violence, black humour and social satire, it Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Has the British seaside ever looked more alien than in Roman Polanski’s absurdist drama Cul-de-Sac? Filmed on Holy Island, the tide steals the causeway that led craggy American gangster, Richard (played by Lionel Stander) to an isolated, run-down castle where he proceeds to terrorise the couple who live there. Richard’s partner in a heist-gone-wrong drowns slowly in their getaway car – they’ve stolen a driving instructor’s jalopy – and he holes up with George (Donald Pleasence) and Teresa (Francoise Dorléac) and torments them. Very much influenced by Beckett and Pinter, this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There have been three versions of King Kong and only one of them answers the question of how they get a massive ape back to New York. In 1976 they shipped him in an oil tanker, but the vessels in RKO’s 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s 2005 homage were nothing like big enough.The new Kong is so colossal that there is no thought of monetising him back in the Apple. How would they airlift him off? This 3D neo- monstrosity stands 60 foot tall, twice the size of any previous screen appearances. They’d need a fleet of helicopters to lift him, and he doesn’t like choppers: a fleet of them are soon Read more ...
Saskia Baron
From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21st-century Western. Subtly feminist, she paints a portrait of women making their way in a male landscape, steeped in pioneer history and overshadowed by economic disappointment. Certain Women is adapted from three short stories by Marile Meloy, but it could have Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is psychohistory: an attempt to heal Alejandro Jodorowsky’s turbulent Forties youth by reimagining it. The 88-year-old director of the acid Western El Topo, which was loved by John Lennon, still plans a sequel to that surreal, midnight movie favourite of hippie New York, so Endless Poetry isn’t necessarily his last act. Itself a sequel to The Dance of Reality’s lovely evocation of his Chilean childhood, it again generously comes to terms with his past. It’s a good spell to go into the night with.Resuming straight after The Dance of Reality, we return to young Alejandro’s family as they Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Partition of India is vast and unexplored terrain in modern cinema. It triggered the migration of 14 million people: Muslims moved from an India reduced in size overnight to the new homeland of Pakistan, and non-Muslims made the opposite journey. It was what we’ve seen in Syria but multiplied by sheer volume of numbers, and squeezed into a much smaller timeframe. The border squiggled on the map was arbitrary and conjured up in haste. So a film about this seismic subcontinental shift is long overdue. It has fallen to Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker of Indian origin brought up in Kenya Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Cutlers are Pa Larkin's Darling Buds of May clan gone feral, rampaging across the Cotswolds. With Brendan Gleeson as patriarch Colby and Michael Fassbender as the troubled heir to his travellers’ caravan throne, the tone is country miles from David Jason’s bucolic idyll, which the Cutlers affront at every turn. They are outlaws in the leafy lanes of a Gloucestershire Eden, whose mansions they rob for fun and profit. But Trespass Against Us finally falls too in love with its rogues to see its story straight.Screenwriter Alastair Siddons first tackled this tale in a documentary about the Read more ...