Film
graham.rickson
The Teachers’ Lounge should really have been translated into English as The Staffroom, but that’s a minor gripe. Focussing on a class of 11-year-olds in a German secondary school, İlker Çatak’s Oscar-nominated feature shows school life as a microcosm of the outside world, showing what can happen “when a society, such as a school community, is poisoned with speculation and prejudices.”Leonie Benesch plays Carla Nowak, a young, newly appointed teacher. Idealistic and enthusiastic, she’s initially got her class exactly where she wants them: they’re working hard and treating her and one another Read more ...
graham.rickson
Happy End’s big draw is its central conceit, that of a convicted murderer narrating his life story backwards from the guillotine to the cradle. Made in 1967 by Oldfřich Lipský (1924-1986), renowned as a director of off-beat comedies, you wonder how on earth such a peculiar film was produced during such a turbulent time in Czechoslovak history.Lipský himself described Happy End as an experiment, “though not in the sense of the new waves…”, he and co-screenwriter Milos Macourek more worried about viewers finding Happy End incomprehensible than in any political interference. What could be a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t cast a spell as strongly as his Oscar-winning hit Drive My Car, it is a thought-provoking film well worth seeing for anyone with an interest in ecology or a penchant for subtle thrillers. Hitoshi Omika plays Tamuki, a widowed dad who spends his days looking after his young daughter and doing odd jobs in Mizubiki, a village high in the mountains but only a few hours away from Tokyo. Its rural isolation – deer wander in the woods nearby, drinking water comes from a well – means that life is pretty simple for the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Io Capitano works on several levels. At first glance, it’s a ripping yarn – two optimistic Senegalese teenagers embark on a dangerous journey, across the Sahara, through the hell of Libya and on to an overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean – all inspired by the lads’ dream of Europe. It could be watched as a terrific, occasionally terrifying adventure movie, but its Italian director, Matteo Garrone, has greater ambitions. Flights of fantasy (pictured below) are occasionally woven into the naturalistic action. In interviews, Garrone has described Io Capitano as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Before moving house, Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk) are throwing a final dinner for their best and oldest friends. Sarah wants it to be special. It turns out to be very special. Disastrous, in fact.Director Matt Winn’s black comedy of middle class manners, set in a north London house (looks like Muswell Hill, and there are shots of Alexandra Park at night) ticks lots of property porn boxes and features fine, sparky performances from its glossy cast, but it’s more like a silly, mildly amusing West End farce than anything else. Lots of bandying around of the F word, but the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In a Dagenham hospital, Silver Haze’s compassionate nurse Franky, played by Vicky Knight, meets Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles), who’s been admitted as a patient for having attempted suicide. After Franky dumps her boyfriend, the two women begin a tempestuous affair – or is that a tautology? Since this intimate low-budget romantic drama adopts Franky’s subjectivity, it’s apt that her impressions of falling in love glow with the effects of the eponymous marijuana strain she uses to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-Hollywood conviction.Alice (Chastain) and Céline (Hathaway) are friends and neighbours, bonding over their eight-year-old sons Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell, pictured bottom with Hathaway) and Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). They team up, too, over Alice’s desire to return to work in journalism, inevitably dismissed by respective husbands Simon (Anders Read more ...
James Saynor
The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.From what I can make out, in reality, the Earth’s large creatures are generally the kind and peaceable ones – whales, elephants, the Jolly Green Giant etc – while the little ’uns like us cause all the trouble. Of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her father, who she’s tracked down and has never met. Her voice trembles, she can barely speak, she has to hang up. But finally she manages it. This is Stéphane, she murmurs. May I speak to Serge?Written and directed by Sébastien Marnier (Faultless; School’s Out), this thriller has an excellent cast and looks wonderful, although the plot-line is somewhat preposterous and soap-opera-esque. Nevertheless, it’s stylish and gripping, and it’s not until half-way through that we realise that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.With some chronological sleight of hand, Ferrara splices the life of the titular Franciscan priest, a mystic visionary eventually beatified for receiving the stigmata in 1918, and the October 14 1920 massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo, where 14 villagers protesting landowners’ overturning of their first free Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
In Late Night With the Devil, light entertainment rubs shoulders with demonic forces on a talk show. It isn't quite the homerun its 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest, but this Australian indie production punches above its weight with an effective found-footage concept and lived-in 1970s setting. Regrettably, excitement for the movie's long-awaited cinema release has been dampened by controversy over its makers' use of AI-generated images.An opening montage sequence swiftly establishes the premise. Televisions feed footage of the Vietnam War and satanic panic into the homes of Americans Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Who you going to call? Five films into the Ghostbusters franchise, every persuadable survivor from the ’84 original, plus the ad hoc, Paul Rudd-led Spengler clan introduced in the series-reviving Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). The low-key, humane, borderline dull result bears little tonal relation to that bombastic founding film.Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire inevitably ups the ante from the slow-burning Afterlife, with the Spenglers relocated from Oklahoma to the old Ghostbusters’ firehouse base, and an early, careening Manhattan ghost-hunt. Old bureaucratic nemesis Walter Peck (William Read more ...