Film
Adam Sweeting
The X-Men films have frequently managed to bring a shot of ethical awareness and emotional engagement to the superhero party, but even so this swansong for Hugh Jackman’s Logan (aka Wolverine) is likely to take your breath away. With James Mangold at the helm as director and co-writer, this is a haunting elegy for times past, battles fought and comrades lost, as Logan finds himself grudgingly dragged out of a drink-sodden semi-retirement as a limo driver.Elsewhere in the Marvel and DC universes, they’re permanently upping the ante in terms of firepower, cities destroyed, and the number of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Translating terrorism is tricky. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student is an adaptation of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg which was staged in London two years ago under its original title, Martyr. One exchange in this story (which is set in and around a school) references what might happen if Christian extremists pursued their beliefs with a fervour we associate more with militant Islam. The two concepts don’t quite combine in English as they did in Russian, which used the title (M)Uchennik, a play on the two words which caught the associations of both. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Joan Crawford’s towering, lauded and Oscar-awarded lead performance in Michael Curtiz’s powerful 1945 film Mildred Pierce has the potential to diminish appreciation of the film as a whole. It can be watched for her career-reviving depiction of the titular character, and that could be enough. But it is a film of rare depth, extraordinary subtlety and can be taken many ways. It is about female empowerment, made when many of America’s men were otherwise occupied. It is also about a mother’s sacrifice for her daughter. It has a string of venal characters whose goal is to use others for their own Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. A musical about Hollywood losing Hollywood’s top prize to an intimate indie film about a gay black man’s coming of age in Miami is already pretty big news, coming after several years of #Oscarssowhite-led complaints that diversity had been discarded Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When Carrie White’s hand jumps out of the grave to drag Amy Irving’s character to hell, the shock is Psycho-intense. Carrie’s director Brian De Palma had, though, put equal care into the seconds preceding it, as Irving leaves the house to a score signalling calm after the film’s convulsive climax. He had Irving exit backwards, and when the footage was reversed to seem normal, a distant car now drove the wrong way. Wrongness was buried in the frame, the camera readying your subconscious for terror.Among the Movie Brats who marvellously came of age in the Seventies, and are now mostly in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan leaves the time and place of It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) deliberately unclear: “Somewhere, a while ago already” is the only clue offered by its opening titles. An adaptation of the 1990 play by the French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, its unspoken subject is AIDS (from which Lagarce himself died in 1995), with its story of a lead character, Louis, returning to his family after a long absence to reveal that he is dying. It’s not only the absence of mobile phones or email that reveals we’re in the past: clearly, it’s a time when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With its familiar scenario of massed zombies on the offensive against the living, South Korean blockbuster Train to Busan stands or falls on the fresh twists in brings to the table. For director Yeon Sang-ho’s first feature with live actors – previous films The Fake, King of Pigs and Seoul Station were animated – he sets the action on a high-speed train hurtling towards a zombie-free zone on which hordes of zombies are sniffing out the unafflicted. Its prequel, Seoul Station, was also a zombie film and set in the titular train station and its trains. Train to Busan, so to speak, leaves the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Patriots Day is a patriots’ film. It dramatises the grievous day on which American values were threatened on American soil like no other time since 9/11. Two bombs were detonated at the Boston marathon in April 2013: two bystanders were killed, 16 lost limbs while two policemen would go on to lose their lives. The two terrorists of Chechen origin who planted the bombs were hunted down by Boston police and the FBI until the streets were once more safe.How to put a human face on a story with so many disparate elements? The opening sequences carefully introduce us to the various individuals Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.While taking his protagonists on the physical journey from Scotland to Mauron in the north west of France, director Niall McCann takes them on an emotional journey, too: from the close-knit friendships and fertile new music Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East. Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s melodrama dates its 14-year timespan – events unroll from 1931 to the end of the war in 1945 – with reference to the Chinese revolution of 1911 (titles read, “20 years after” etc), but the film’s social commentary is so acute that it’s no surprise that another, more far-reaching turmoil would hit the country, transforming it into the Communist People's Republic, just two years after the film's 1947 release. With hindsight, they should have been dating it in terms of “ Read more ...