Film
Nick Hasted
Dracula’s fly-eating henchman Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) seeks solace in a self-help group from his co-dependent, fanged boss (Nicolas Cage), in a comic horror action flick which posits the pair as a vampiric Steptoe and Son – though that relationship was more genuinely nightmarish.The Dark Universe Universal hoped to create around its classic 1930s monsters crashed with the redundant medieval origin story Dracula Untold (2014) and braindead Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy (2017), but standalone hit The Invisible Man (2020) – ditching H.G. Wells for an Elisabeth Moss domestic abuse Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his investigation of a murder unpicks his faith in his department’s violent corruption, and the Arab Spring briefly brings that world crashing down. Now Cairo Conspiracy, a Cannes prize-winner for Best Screenplay and big hit in France, sees innocent Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) leave his fishing village to study at Cairo’s iconic Islamic university Al-Azhar. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In the first scene of Mia Hanson-Løve’s wonderful One Fine Morning, Sandra (Léa Seydoux in a minimal, nuanced performance), is trying to visit her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), in his Paris flat. But, stuck on the other side, he can’t find the door or turn the key to let her in.He’s unreachable in more ways than one: he has Benson’s syndrome, a neuro-degenerative disease that is similar to dementia and affects speech and vision, a particularly cruel fate for a professor of philosophy whose life has been devoted to thinking and reading.This end-of-life sadness is juxtaposed, in a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this documentary from the Swiss-born Eva Vitija. We hear the director say at the outset that by reading her then-unpublished diaries she learned to love, not just the writing, but the writer, which not all commentators have managed to do.It’s tempting to say, "Join the queue, lady.” Highsmith was the most prolific of seducers, haunting gay bars around the world and specialising in pursuing married women. None of the relationships lasted, except for a couple Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.Director and co-writer Jun'ya Satô’s main character is HIkari 109, a button-nosed 0-series (first-generation) Shinkansen express travelling the 1100 km between Tokyo and Hakata, a trip that then took seven hours. Seeking a $5 million pay-off, criminals Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether grinding or eerie, bellicose or plaintive, the exquisite jazz- and classical-infused prog rock dirges disgorged by King Crimson over the last 54 years stand apart from the more accessible sounds made by their illustrious peers, including Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Curved Air, and ELP. Given the discomfiting aesthetic of Crimson’s music – a fulminating anti-panacea, relentlessly modernistic – is it any wonder there was much misery in its making?Watching Toby Amies’s documentary In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is an enthralling and often amusing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iceland’s soul lies in its interior, a forbidding heartland which overwhelms 19th century Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) on his ill-considered posting to this colonial backwater.Director Hlynur Pálmason showed his talent for snapping unbending male psyches in a country of physical extremes in A White, White Day, a film as visceral as Scorsese in its riven machismo, Malick-like in its vaporous, uncanny landscapes, and wholly Icelandic in its saga-resembling trials and consequences.Simmering masculine conflict sharpens the brew here too, though both films are laced with humour. The Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
All the best sports movies are about more than just sport: the core might be friendship, romance, the battle against discrimination, the importance of following your dreams, of self-realisation and fulfilment, of fighting the corporate machine, of David v Goliath. Admirable themes, all. So, Air is a little different. While it may be mistaken for a sports movie – after all, it touches on the early years of legendary basketball player Michael Jordan – it actually isn’t. At the heart of Air, is money. Money is even more important in Air than it is in Moneyball Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sometimes one admires a film without wholly loving it because the high level of craft displayed on screen holds at arms’ length emotional engagement with the story. LOLA is that kind of movie – an ingeniously devised tale of time-travel, set in 1941 and replete with World War Two newsreels that have been altered with all the digital skills its makers could summon.It’s not quite deepfake, but the result is impressive and intriguing, even if all this dazzling artifice gets in the way of connecting with the central characters.Stefani Martini and Emma Appleton play a pair of orphaned Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
This is a Hamlet for fans of speed-dating. It comes in at just over the two-hour mark, which is standard for a feature film. But considering the uncut text runs to four hours, as it did in the 1996 Kenneth Branagh film (and his earlier stage production), big chunks of text have clearly gone missing.Only those fascinated with the Fortinbras sub-plot that snakes through the action, a counterpoint to the dynastic struggle at Elsinore, will mind most of the cuts, however. John Haidar, the stage director of the 2022 Bristol Old Vic production filmed here by Tom Morris, has rightly calculated Read more ...
Saskia Baron
"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.A consortium of bands reworked Jamaican ska, calypso and reggae beats and imbued them with punk energy and their own socially conscious lyrics. In an era when the National Front stirred up racial hatred, the 2-Tone philosophy was all about mixing up young people with a multicultural agenda – two-tone in every way. And as well as black and white musicians up on stage Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the Middle profiles 10 football officials who referee and run the line of lower-league games in south-west London and north-east Surrey. Pondering what drives these apparently sane individuals to do such an onerous job, director-producer Greg Cruttwell's documentary is a vibrant study in diversity and concomitant prejudice that benefits from his light touch.As a film actor, Cruttwell made his debut as the sexually predatory gym bunny and landlord Jeremy/Sebastian, a correlative to David Thewlis’s Johnny, in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). Like Leigh, Cruttwell has a powerful radar for Read more ...