Film
Tom Birchenough
There are memorable appearances from two great actors playing close to the top of their game in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, but they’re almost upstaged by something else. Nothing human – though their reunion and interaction in the film is being “directed” by an absent third party – but rather the environment in which they find themselves: the stark desert beauty and almost unbearable temperature of California’s Death Valley.The fact that they are played by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, who play characters named Isabelle and Gérard, themselves two actors of a certain vintage Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Brent is unwell. The irritating giggle that punctuates his verbiage is now hysterical. His reality show infamy in The Office led to a nervous breakdown, and the one-time boss of Wernham Hogg (Slough branch) is now a travelling tampon salesman for a sanitary firm. He’s a wearying man out of time to most of his younger co-workers, a laughing stock and irritant. It’s like late Hancock, replayed by a talentless buffoon.The Office was always excruciating as much as it was funny. The laughs come most cleanly this time in early, rapid-fire scenes of Brent the salesman at work, Willy Loman Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and first wife Frances Taylor, the film was trapped in a pipeline for aeons. While he waited, Cheadle had plenty of time to turn himself into a trumpeter good enough to perform onstage in the film’s coda with Davis collaborators Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.The wait was so long that it easily outstrips Davis’s five-year fallow period in the 1970s when Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Peter Hall’s 1974 film depicts English village life when its roots still ran deep, with generations sunk often unwillingly into the same soil. Based on Ronald Blythe’s 1969 bestseller Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Blythe and Hall – both “Suffolk men who have been reconditioned into intellectuals”, as Hall wrote in his diary – collaborated closely on location. Their amateur cast were drawn from the villages Blythe had canvassed for his non-fiction book. Their East Anglian burrs are almost impenetrable, a land-locked language spoken under big Suffolk skies.Garrow Shand plays sullen Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Coinciding with both Pokémon Go madness and a developing backlash against the insidious modern plague of mobile gadgets, Nerve is a moral fable for the social media era, and a Cinderella story that turns into The Hunger Games. Luckily, it's much more fun than that makes it sound.The movie's title is also the name of an online game in which players undertake increasingly risky dares while being egged on (via a mobile phone app) by unseen controllers. These have access to all the participants' various sources of online information (Facebook, Instagram, whatever), which they use to exploit the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of European cinema’s most dynamic storytellers, Jacques Audiard chose to follow his iconoclastic romance Rust and Bone and remorseless prison drama A Prophet with a film addressing Europe’s refugee crisis. The no less searing Dheepan won the Palme d’or at Cannes last year.The decision to depict the experiences of three Hindu Tamils newly arrived in France was prompted by the likelihood that the movie’s predominantly French audience would be relatively unfamiliar with the fallout of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009. In terms of posterity, it was a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A woman’s brain is a mystery,” explains one man to another in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. “You have to pay attention to women. Be thoughtful occasionally. Caress them. Remember they exist, they’re alive and they matter to us.” They matter to no one so much as the great Spanish film director. Almodóvar has flirted with exploring the emotional ebb and flow of homosexuality in his work, but for the most part he has pursued his veneration of the fairer sex. “Women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects,” he once explained. “They have a greater range of registers.”The proof is in the film Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Ukraine embroiled in conflict and a currency crisis the Odessa International Film Festival does not have the budget to bring in big stars. In any case, most of those pampered A-listers would have been nervous to go to what they or their advisers would have assumed to be a conflict zone. One really has to to admire the Festival’s volunteer-fuelled enthusiasm - it may be the underdog of international film fests, but it delivers an enlightening, elegantly organised and hugely enjoyable event. The Brit element was out in relative force this year. The winner of the festival’s main prize Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sweet Bean is one of those slow, gentle Japanese fables that one either loves or finds infuriatingly sentimental. Directed by documentarian Naomi Kawase, a film festival favourite whose features rarely make it to the UK, it played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and divided the critics. The French and Americans loved it, while hard-nosed British critics scoffed. Adapted from a novel, it’s the story of Sentaro, who makes dorayaki (little pancake purses stuffed with sweet red bean paste) and sells them from a corner shop in a Tokyo back street. Masatoshi Nagase plays Sentaro as a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of Queen Christina Vasa of Sweden has been told in opera, novels and on stage. It was first addressed by cinema in 1933 when Greta Garbo played the title role in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. Liv Ullmann then took the part in 1974’s The Abdication.The reasons for the persistent attraction to the story are clear. Christina was six when her father King Gustav II Adolph was killed in battle in 1632. Queen at 18, she studied voraciously and wanted knowledge and literacy for all. In thrall to the ideas of Descartes, she brought him to Sweden. She did not obediently accept Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which has been re-released, is one of the most stately costume dramas films ever made. It is also a monument to tedium, a tale told so deliberately, ponderously, and humorlessly that it raises the question, as do Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, of whether their maker was a genuine master or is a sacred cow. In his adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon especially, Kubrick’s meticulously achieved “realism” (which avoids the squalour of the poor), lugubrious grandeur, Read more ...