Film
Kieron Tyler
This must be one of the year’s most remarkable archive exhumations: it may well become the re-release of 2015. A French take on the western released in 1969, Cemetery Without Crosses was explicitly made in the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Leone even directed one scene – a set piece in which the cast gather around a table for dinner. Its director and lead actor Robert Hossein says it was France’s first western.Hossein was meant to be in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but his contract with French company Gaumont prevented him taking the job so he set to creating his own Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Truth isn't so much stranger than fiction as it is duller. That, at least, is the abiding impression left by True Story, the debut film from the adventuresome theatre director Rupert Goold that by rights ought to be considerably more exciting than it is. Bringing together Jonah Hill and James Franco in a cat-and-mouse game that begins when one appropriates the identity of the other, the result pounds away at its thesis about how similar these apparent adversaries are without extracting much meat from their encounters. The rewards come largely from watching Hill further his expanding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson’s ecstasy started to fade when he was resurrected. The ex-Dr Feelgood guitarist seemed to be living out a surreal final chapter with an unavoidable end when his January 2013 diagnosis with inoperable cancer flooded him with the wonder of life, leaving him content for perhaps the first time. This reaction ironically raised his career to a new peak, as radio and TV queued to hear the dead man talking, and an album with Roger Daltrey hit the Top 10. Then, in a dizzying turn, he didn’t die. It’s a strange, thought-provoking tale.Johnson, like his old band, was largely forgotten when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of Downfall, which has since made all Anglophone portrayals of the Third Reich look dismally bogus. So it’s of note that Downfall’s director Oliver Hirschbiegel, having taken leave of his senses to make Diana, has turned his attention to the lesser-known attempt on the Führer’s life.Georg Elser’s attempt to kill Hitler took place on 8 November 1939 in Read more ...
David Nice
Pallid figures in striplit rooms with too much empty space: if you’ve seen a Roy Andersson film before, you’ll know what to expect from his latest essay on the human comedy. Truly human the film becomes only by cautious degrees, even if we start out laughing at rather than sighing with characters like the hapless salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holge Andersson), who only want people to have fun with vampire teeth, a bag of laughs and a sinister rubber mask. It’s a bit like a sketch show with running gags, but instead of diminishing returns this meditation on harsh, sad existence Read more ...
ellin.stein
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father. As with all such biopics of artists, it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Post-Blitz London starts as a playground and ends as a shadowy nightmare for 12-year-old Frankie (Andrew Ray). The Yellow Balloon is both a fine film about children and Britain’s second X certificate release, not really a contradiction as it shrugs off its early disguise as a kids’ adventure yarn to explore how vulnerable a child’s life can be.Frankie is the happy son of loving parents Ted and Em (Kenneth More and Kathleen Ryan), given sixpence to buy a yellow balloon. A swift sequence of thoughtless misadventures leave his friend a corpse fallen from a bombed-out building, watched by crooked Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.Which makes his latest, P’tit Quinquin, a departure indeed, both in mood and format. Though thematically the comedy is distinctly dark, its sense of the absurd is often laugh-out-loud funny, resulting in an ambiguous feeling Read more ...
ellin.stein
US films about and aimed at African Americans broadly fall into two categories: gangsta life in the ‘hood action flicks and broad comedies, the latter niche dominated by Tyler Perry, who does for Black Americans what Mrs Brown does for Irish women. Dear White People, on the other hand, is a sophisticated social satire in the vein of Spike Lee’s early She’s Gotta Have It or Bamboozled. It’s packed with ideas and waspish observations worthy of (in a somewhat different context) the Dowager Countess of Downton, and if the social commentary and media critique sometimes threatens to overwhelm the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Since his debut Honour of the Knights back in 2006 Catalan director Albert Serra has carved out a niche for himself, creating cinema that is frequently oblique and visually engrossing. Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort), which won the director the Golden Leopard at the Locarno festival two years ago, looks like his most approachable film to date – it includes considerably more language than his previous works, as well as a touch more narrative – but still reveals itself slowly.There’s no direct revelation until well in as to the identity of its main character, the inimitable 18th- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Last year’s Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) played out in the shadow of conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and a year on you could be forgiven for wondering if anything’s really changed. International sanctions remain in place – in fact they were renewed for another six months right in the middle of MIFF’s late-June run, and much alluded to by festival president Nikita Mikhalkov throughout proceedings.Funding issues reflecting Russia’s economic recession saw the festival itself shortened by two days, and its main competition programme reduced to a dozen films. Read more ...