Film
Helen Hawkins
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, about the key role caste systems play in subjugating whole racial groups, was a runaway success in the US in 2020. Here, the Pultizer-Prize winning black journalist is not so well known. Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of her book aims to change that.DuVernay has all the tools for creating a passionate polemic. She has already made a hard-hitting documentary, 13th, about egregious injustices in the US prison system that penalise blacks, as well as the TV series When They See Us, about the miscarriage of justice surrounding the Read more ...
James Saynor
Filmmakers of note make long movies for different reasons. Sometimes they may want the viewer to be so immersed in the movie they become “kidnapped” by it, to borrow an idea from Susan Sontag. (Epics by auteurs like Greece’s Theo Angelopoulis or Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan may be in this bracket.)Sometimes – whisper it softly – directors such as Martin Scorsese may not always have the full measure of a story’s pacing. And sometimes filmmakers are just bonkers trash-art weirdos who want to annoy the hell out of everyone, audiences and movie financiers alike. Such appears to be the case with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune sequel is a sombre science-fiction spectacle that insists on the scale of cinema: erupting sandworms are Cecil B. DeMille colossal, the sound design centred on Hans Zimmer’s score thunderously enveloping. In a genre once jokingly called space opera, its grand aristocratic dynasties and passions justify the term.It also treats its 1965 Frank Herbert source as a classic novel, teasing out abiding themes from its proto-hippie era. Vietnam-style aerial gunships hover, and atomic warfare, religious faith and extremism, ecology and colonialism give the narrative sinew.We Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Diablo Cody’s biggest screenwriting hit was 2007’s Juno, a larky but tender story of teenage pregnancy. She’s gone back to high school for her latest, Lisa Frankenstein, which focuses on another troubled teen. This one has goth looks accessorised with an axe.With director Zelda Williams hammering home the horror, it’s a black comedy but not quite as radical as Cody’s 18-rated Jennifer’s Body (2009), in which another young woman went gorily rogue. This one stars Kathryn Newton as Lisa Swallows, who has witnessed her mother being murdered in a home invasion. Within a year, her father married a Read more ...
James Saynor
The French military outpost on Madagascar is a “family cocoon, full of love and benevolence”, according to a character in this fictional portrait of the country in the early 1970s. Of course, as soon as we hear this claim near the start of Red Island, we assume we’re about to witness anything but.What follows, however, is less a broadside against French colonialism, or even against the nuclear family, than a largely personal exercise in nostalgia. Sixty years on from The Battle of Algiers, a film that exposed the horrors of France’s imperial adventures to the world, Robin Campillo’s new movie Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Hilmar Oddsson’s award-winning film Driving Mum is pitch-perfect. Jon has spent the last 30 years looking after his domineering mother. There they sit, side by side, in a remote cottage on Iceland’s western fjords, knitting jumpers to sell to the neighbourhood co-op. And as they work, their skeins of wool become entwined – a gentle reminder of how inextricably enmeshed their lives have become.Now, though, Mamma is planning to die and she makes her son promise that he will take her back to her distant village for burial. But she also wants to be photographed at Gullfoss, a beauty spot famous Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A splendid cast struggle to make something coherent out of Wicked Little Letters, the latest film from Thea Sharrock who not that long ago was one of the hottest theatre directors in town.Sharrock's proven skill onstage with thesps ranging from Benedict Cumberbatch to Kevin Spacey may explain the starry assemblage on view down the line, but no amount of Olivier and Oscar winners - or, in Eileen Atkins, a Dame - can concoct a satisfying whole that often plays like an Alan Bennett caprice run amok: an enquiry into Englishness that trades more than it really needs to in affixing potty-mouthed Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is given a new lease on life in Mexican director Michel Franco’s moving, complex film, full of fine performances.Saul (a wonderful Peter Sarsgaard), who has early-onset dementia, plays the song constantly. It’s a kind of comfort blanket for him and his fading memory gives those loopy lyrics a new significance.The film starts with a slightly confounding, busy scene in which Sylvia (an unadorned Jessica Chastain), a care worker in an adult day centre, attends an AA meeting in a Brooklyn church with her teenage daughter Anna (an impressive Brooke Timber, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old German director in existentially questing mode.The Oscar-nominated drama, Wenders' biggest box-office success, takes its title from Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and its Zen-like serenity from its protagonist Hirayama (affectingly played by Kōji Yakusho). A kind-hearted, middle-aged bachelor, Hirayama is employed as a cleaner of the architecturally diverse Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Diving into this three-disc set of early films by maverick Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski leaves one reeling, an arresting reminder of the vibrancy and flair of so much 1960s Eastern European cinema.This isn’t a valedictory package: Skolimowski, now aged 85, is still active and his recent EO won the 2022 jury prize at Cannes. 1965’s Walkower (Walkover) was Skolimowski’s official debut feature, opening bleakly with an offscreen suicide and following the progress of Skolimowski’s filmic alter-ego Leszczyc, arriving in a grubby town dominated by a huge factory. A former engineering classmate Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last Yoko Ono is being acknowledged in Britain as a major avant garde artist in her own right. It has been a long wait; last year was her 90th birthday! The problem, of course, was her relationship with John Lennon and perceptions of her as the Japanese weirdo who broke up the Beatles and led Lennon astray – down a crooked path to oddball, hippy happenings.Most notorious were the Bed-ins which the couple staged in the late 1960s as a protest against the Vietnam war. At the heart of Tate Modern’s exhibition is the 1969 film BED PEACE in which we see the couple advocating peace from hotel Read more ...