Film
Nick Hasted
John Hughes’ most beloved cult film feels like contraband now, a bracingly harsh bulletin from Eighties teen life, full of barbed, uncensored talk between its five school detention misfits – the titular “breakfast club”.It’s nothing like Hughes’ kinetic comedies Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) and Home Alone (1990), or the aspirational teen rebellion of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The Breakfast Club (1985) was written to be his directorial debut – though the more conventional, Molly Ringwald-starring Sixteen Candles (1984) was filmed first – and its Midwest schoolkids have a stagey Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This third Creed film outgrows Rocky, leaving Stallone’s bridging presence behind for a wholly renewed series. Starring again as Adonis Creed, the illegitimate son of Rocky’s late rival Apollo, Michael B. Williams’ directorial debut builds a richly conceived African-American world in and out of the ring.A double-prologue starts with a flashback to Adonis as a teen in 2002, sneaking out from his newly privileged life with Apollo’s widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) to roam LA with old children’s home friend Damian, till a violent incident sends Damian to jail. Fifteen years later, Adonis ends a Read more ...
graham.rickson
As films involving cats go, The Cassandra Cat (Až přijde kocour) is up there with the best. Part fairy-tale, part political satire, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1963 fantasy, shot on location in the picturesque village of Telcis, is an offbeat, unclassifiable gem. Unsurprisingly, the post-1968 Czech authorities disapproved, withdrawing it from circulation.Jasný’s characters have their lives turned upside down by the titular feline, a hefty tabby wearing dark glasses. If they're removed, those who the cat gazes at will change colour according to their nature.A prologue features Jan Werich’s affable Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is an object lesson in how it was possible to make a feature on a tiny budget despite the restrictions of the pandemic lockdown. The film-makers stuck to the classical unities (time, place, action), cast themselves and members of the crew, called in favours from performer friends, and shot the movie over 10 days, mainly outdoors.It follows one day in the life of Danny (Kelley Kali, who co-wrote and co-directed the film) on the streets of Van Nuys. Recently widowed Danny is homeless and struggling to scrape the cash together for the down payment on a place to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Begin describing Aftersun to someone who’s not seen it and you’ll struggle. Charlotte Wells’ debut feature looks embarrassingly slight on paper, its 93 minutes following a young girl on a Turkish package holiday in the late 1990s with her youthful dad.The trip is mostly seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Glaswegian Sophie (Frankie Corio) in flashback, much of the footage recorded by her on a camcorder. Paul Mescal’s affable Calum, seemingly amicably separated from Sophie’s mum, is a superficially sunny presence. Wells hints at Calum’s demons only obliquely; there’s a suggestion of money Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a question. A romcom stars a man and woman, friends from childhood, both straight and with no romantic history. He's a Muslim and has decided to pursue an arranged marriage; she has a chaotic love life. What are the odds that they will end up together at the end of the film?No prizes for guessing correctly. But first-time screenwriter Jemima Khan takes us on a nicely circuitous route to get to that ending, and provides lots of smart one-liners on the way. When Kazim (Shazad Latif) tells Zoe (Lily James) an arranged marriage is now called “assisted marriage”, she replies: “Like assisted Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Partially banned in Pakistan, Saim Sadiq’s debut uses a young man’s affair with a trans woman to reveal the sadness and brutality of the nation’s patriarchal norms. It’s also a deeply sympathetic character study written from under the country’s skin, which Sadiq calls “a heartbroken love letter to my homeland”.Haider (Ali Junejo) is casually bullied by older brother Saleem (Sohail Saheer) and ageing patriarch Rana (Salmaan Peerzada) for his lack of machismo. It’s his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) who seizes a knife from him to slash a goat’s throat, its blood pooling darkly on courtyard tiles, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is one of those films where it’s really best to stick with the trailer. The incompetence of the directing and screenwriting is easy to disguise when a crafty promo-maker has picked out the good bits from a large pile of bear scat. Cocaine Bear aspires to be comedy horror (think Tremors, Gremlins, An American Werewolf in London) but falls short both in terms of thrills and giggles. The movie was inspired by the discovery in 1985 of an American black bear dead in the woods of Tennessee after it had found and eaten a huge amount of cocaine jettisoned from a drug Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia of Akram Khan’s Creature, made for English National Ballet in 2021, has transformed the original live version into a moving drama.Creature still isn’t an easy watch. It’s set in a vast murky room with high ceilings and wooden planks for walls. Outside, when the side doors occasionally open, there is blindingly white light and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda chose to make Broker in South Korea, with Parasite star, Song Kang-ho. He plays one of two dodgy chaps who make a living selling abandoned babies to desperate couples. Although the landscape is different – their business sees them driving a minivan all over the country – the sly sentiment that informs Kore-eda’s style will be familiar to the audiences that loved his earlier films, including Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018. Broker isn’t as obviously quirky as Shoplifters, which Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).There are no comedies here – late mid-life brought out the full darkness of the Swedish director’s palette – although Fanny and Alexander both delights and shocks as it combines a characteristic lightness of touch, including a much-loved farting uncle and a child’s eye view of adult rituals, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We’ve now reached film 31 and Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly baroque franchise. Four years after Avengers: Endgame’s false finale, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is still basking in his role in reversing Thanos’s genocidal Blip, and reacting to the MCU’s version of the pandemic by semi-retiring from Avenging for some Me time.Until, that is, his wife the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), their now adult daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) ill-advisedly contact the Quantum Realm, and the whole Ant-family are sucked into its Read more ...