Film
Sarah Kent
Yihao is a disaffected 20 year old living in Chengdu, capital of Sichaun Province. A thriving centre for business and commerce, Chengdu looks like any other modern city. You could mistake it for downtown Chicago except that, apart from the Walmart logo, the signage is in Chinese.Yihao isn’t interested in making money, though. Having dropped out of school, he performs as a drag queen at Funky Town, a gay bar that welcomes young people who feel alienated from society. But the venue is earmarked for demolition to make way for a new subway station and Ben Mullinkosson’s documentary is a loving Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.There was a pro forma feeling to the roll call of winners under host Jimmy Kimmel's eye that saw, across nearly 3.5 hours, Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, and Robert Downey Jr win as best director, actor, and supporting actor, respectively – all prizes they had been expected to take.The same was true of Da'Vine Joy Randolph's supporting actress nod as Mary Lamb, the grieving cafeteria manager in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Fashion has a very short memory. Maybe that’s part of its charm,” says Robin Givhan of The Washington Post in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary. Whether anyone can forget John Galliano’s drunken anti-Semitic and racist outpourings at La Perle, his local café in the Marais in Paris in 2011, followed by his sacking by Dior, where he’d reigned as creative director for 14 years, is doubtful.But will people, or rather the fashion world, forgive him? It seems, judging by the acclaim for his recent Maison Margiela show in Paris, a spectacular, strange event (lots of corsets and cinched waists - on the Read more ...
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 ...