Film
Markie Robson-Scott
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).But similarities end there, and if you wince occasionally at the violence in The Lighthouse, which includes being buried alive, attacks by a deranged supernatural seagull and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).Benedetta (Virginie Efira) has been imbued with a sense of religious destiny since childhood. Accepted into a Tuscan convent under stern but worldly Abbess Felicia (Charlotte Rampling), confusing, erotically charged dreams of Jesus Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably that of Hiroo Onoda.Paris-born director Arthur Harari’s film traces Onoda’s story from his attempts in 1944 to qualify as a pilot – his trainers failed him because of his fear of heights, though they did offer him the consolation prize of becoming a kamikaze pilot – to his recruitment to a secretive unit specialising in undercover operations. As Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his ruinous machismo, is clueless. The steps – based on love, desire, avarice, jealousy, manipulation and anger – make for a discomfiting coming-of-age drama that won the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year.Filtered through the subjectivity of 17-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipović), as mettlesome as she is callow, this benighted waltz involves her tortured Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.The papers themselves were similarly critical. "A Tory guttersnipe’s view of Socialism" was the assessment of the socialist Daily Worker. The Daily Express opted for sensationalism. Its headline read: "Wife dies as she watches".Adapted by Kneale, obviously, from George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, and now released Read more ...
Nick Hasted
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves West Side Story as much as its Romeo and Juliet, Tony and María, love each other. The material is part of his childhood, as personal as upcoming semi-memoir The Fabelmans. A film about romantic transcendence that ultimately falls to earth, this is one of his most exuberant and serious works, propelled by Leonard Bernstein’s music, ironised by Stephen Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be? And who is he underneath?” Leonard is, in common parlance, a Savile Row tailor – “a cutter from the Row,” he insists – fetched up for murky reasons in 1958 Chicago, where his shop’s best customers are sharp-dressed Mob clan the Boyles. He affects innocence of their business, till scion Richie (Dylan O’Brien) and rival Francis (Johnny Flynn, pictured below) stagger through the door after a bloody shoot-out. A long night of subterfuge and double-cross, poker-faces and slipping masks Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner. Their first encounter is disastrously un-cute, as he leeringly suggests she’s heading north to sell herself, pawing her lap for emphasis. But this idiosyncratically romantic film testifies that most people have something in common, if forced together long enough to find out.Laura thought she’d be sharing her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome. He has always needed name actors who’ll go all the way, six-time collaborator Willem Dafoe’s devotion keeping his recent career going. Ethan Hawke is the star this time, playing twins – soldier JJ and revolutionary Justin – on apparently opposite sides of a plot to blow up the Vatican.Ferrara envisioned Zeros And Ones’ Rome as a “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
“Everything bad that has happened to me has happened because I’m black,” laments teacher Joseph Pascale (David Oyelowo) in Shoot the Messenger, directed by Ngozi Onwurah in 2006 from a script by the late Sharon Foster. Handsomely produced and visually stylish, it was originally broadcast by the BBC.They presumably kyboshed Foster’s original title, Fuck Black People! Not that there’s any suggestion of Foster’s message being toned down: Shoot the Messenger’s anger and energy are infectious, and leavened with judicious splashes of sly wit.We first meet Joe as an over-confident young teacher Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music’s psychological cost might have resulted. Ina Weisse’s film is more incremental and naturalistic, as violin teacher Anna (Nina Hoss) gives special attention to teenage protégé Alexander (Ilja Monti), to the jealous resentment of son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev), while nervously returning to the stage herself.Weisse starts with tableaus of music work at Anna’s Berlin conservatoire. When camera and characters get close-up, the trouble – and, sometimes, loving connection – starts. Because music is in Anna’s family’s bones, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.Symptoms of Morbius’s newfound condition are as follows: super-human speed, super-human strength, echolocation and, as he ultimately discovers, flight. Morbius, for all intents and Read more ...