Film
Saskia Baron
Fifteen years after John Carpenter scored a massive box-office hit with his ingenious low-budget sci-fi thriller Escape from New York (1981), he was given a free rein to make Escape from LA. Unfortunately, unlimited access to extras and all the toys available in the special-effects cupboard in 1993 didn’t make for a better movie. The original dystopian satire turned Kurt Russell into a star as leather-clad, eye-patch-toting Snake Plisken. Former soldier turned convict Snake was offered his freedom if he could rescue a corrupt POTUS from the prison island of Manhattan, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dozen years have passed since Downton Abbey first landed on our TV screens, since when it has passed into folklore. Whether you thought it was escapist historical froth, a ludicrous anachronism full of class-system clichés or a documentary probing the British aristocracy, Downton has lodged itself in the national consciousness, probably forever.However, perhaps even some of its most fervent fans thought that a belated second Downton movie was a bit of a stretch. The first one, from 2019, involved the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary at Downton, prompting panic attacks among family Read more ...
Mark Kidel
François Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague masterpiece revolves around an endlessly mutating love triangle, set in a world that encompasses the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the horror of the First World War, and the book burning that ushered in the Nazi period in Germany. The film is a triumph of humanity as well as a deep and touching reflection on friendship, love and marriage.Jules et Jim marked an era, not least because the two male protagonists, the Austrian actor Oskar Werner as Jules and Henry Serre as Jim, are more sentimental than Catherine, the near-psychopathic and yet overwhelmingly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Crazy? Aristocrat? Sad? Killer? Drunk?” A modern Tuscan hunting lodge’s regulars remember the myth of irascible rebel Luciano many ways, as it endures from the previous century’s misty turn. Italian-American co-directors Matteo Zoppi and Allessio Rigo de Righi’s feature debut follows documentary shorts drawn from those real hunters’ yarns, tipped now into the phantasmagoric territory of Werner Herzog, or Lucretia Martel’s Spanish colonial fever dream, Zama.We first see reflective stars sparking on Luciano’s silhouette in water, and his green eyes elsewhere seem connected to the cosmos. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
France is a female dystopia in Audrey Diwan’s immersive illegal abortion drama, set in 1963 and based on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel.Anamaria Vartolomei is Anne, the first girl from her rural family to go to college, where she is a modest but eager star student. Looming exams are a crucial staging-post towards full escape velocity from provincial, working-class restrictions into the writer’s life she desires. Between classes, she lounges on summer grass with her friends, verbally bold Brigitte (Louise Orrey Diquerro) and cautious, quiet Hélène (Luàna Bajrami-Rahmani, pictured below Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
At a well-attended London press screening of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, there were, as might be expected, knowing chortles from Nicolas Cage-oscenti when specific films from his canon were either inserted or referenced – there were at least 18 of them listed in the closing credits from the hundred or so he has made in total.And yet the appeal of this action comedy is far more general than that. The script, by director Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, definitely has enough comic intent – and our hero himself has enough self-ironicising lightness – to propel a compulsively Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in July 2020.Apparently it took him five globe-trotting years to amass interviews with a huge list of Morricone’s admirers and collaborators, so perhaps it’s no great surprise that he seems to have found editing his material into a manageable shape a daunting task.Tornatore’s decision to plough doggedly through Morricone’s career, from his days as a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You’re mad to try and climb a holy mountain,” says Jomdoe, wife of Sherpa Ngada, as they argue over whether it’s more important to respect the body of God, aka the mountain Kumbhakarna in eastern Nepal, or to take the money earned from a dangerous climbing expedition that could help pay for their son’s education.This beautiful, meditative film by director and climber Eliza Kubarska (K2: Touching the Sky) captures the power of the Himalayas with great intensity. Plot strands, though interesting, pale into insignificance in the face of Kumbhakarna, 7710 metres high, as yet unsullied by humans Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground as a sensitive child.The cold blue colour grading, atmospheric sound design, and choice of camera perspective – always from the height of a child – immerses the audience from the very first moment in Nora’s experiences. No score distracts from the cacophony of the playground, the overwhelming echo and crash of the swimming pool. Quasi- Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in style, without ever being pretentious, the coming-of age story it vividly tells so engaging, and the performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud so thrilling, that it remains fresh and relevant to this day.Léaud, a mixture of cocksure arrogance and touching vulnerability, already evident in his impressive and touching screen test (which is among the extras on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few liberties with the facts (not least a wholly invented episode with a pro-German Irish spy), but Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden and based on Ben Macintyre’s book about the event, mostly plays it with a doggedly straight bat.This is more of a behind-the-scenes howdunnit than a big-bang war movie, and could function credibly as a stage Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss of her archeologist husband five years before, Loretta has been sent on a book-signing tour by her manager, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, giving it both barrels).Bad enough for Loretta that she has to leave her apartment where she could happily stay for ever, but she has to go on the road with Alan (Channing Tatum), the chisel-jawed, hunky model who Read more ...