Film
Graham Fuller
An entertaining but undernourished industrial-domestic neo-noir set in South Wales,The Ballad of Billy McCrae depicts the power struggle between bent quarrying company boss Billy (David Hayman) and gullible failed businessman Chris Blythe (Ian Virgo), the story’s fall-guy protagonist.Directed by the enterprising Welsh filmmaker Chris Crow and dynamically scored by Mark Rutherford, the movie feels compressed – despite cinematographer Alex Metcalfe’s resplendent images of the hills and vales – and rushed. Getting an ambitious film made in Wales is admirable and Crow must have worked with a low Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Switching between upstairs and downstairs makes your soul melt, in this first of three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter films, a savage class satire filmed in the freezing winter of 1963.Hugo (Dirk Bogarde) is the obsequious, insinuating butler who comes to stay with minor, lounging young aristo Tony (James Fox) at his new Chelsea pad. The pricey house is soggy with rot when Hugo arrives, though louche Tony, declaring himself “cosy” with his bed of newspapers and three-bar fire, sees nothing amiss. Hugo’s dubious, papier-mâché provenance as a gentleman’s gentleman is clear from his first Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mark Cousins, the multi-award winning director of this strange film, is lying in bed watching Ray Charles speaking on the Dick Cavett Show in 1972. The singer went blind in childhood; how would he respond if offered the chance to see again? “I might turn it down,” says Charles. “I’m not all that hung up about seeing things … and with some of the news I hear about today, I mean there are some things I absolutely don’t wanna see, man !”“For somebody like me who has always loved looking,” remarks Cousins, “what he says is unbelievable… Looking has been my joy, my world.” He is trying to decide Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Rose (Ann Skelly; The Nevers) is adopted. The name on her birth certificate is Julie and the possibility of a different identity – different clothes, different hair, different accent - beckons. If she could embrace this second life, she thinks, she could be the person she was meant to be. “I’d be the real me.”In their third feature, directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, both originally from Dublin, continue the themes of identity, role-playing and moments of transformation that they explored in the unsettling, meditative Helen (2008) and Mister John (2013). Rose Plays Julie is also an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite an alluring cast which includes Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Kevin Kline, The Starling is doomed to be remembered, if at all, as a slender idea unsatisfyingly executed. Directed by Theodore Melfi from a screenplay by Matt Harris, it’s the story of Lily (McCarthy) and Jack (O’Dowd), a couple whose domestic dream was blown apart by the death of their baby daughter Katie.The past is filled in as the narrative ambles along, from scenes of the pair eagerly imagining what career their new baby might take up (podiatrist? Vegetarian butcher?) to the gradual realisation that all bets are Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
On its surface, a biopic of a late-Victorian artist starring big British talents including Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrea Riseborough and Claire Foy, sounds like typical awards fare for this time of year. Will Sharpe, best-known for directing the dark TV comedy Flowers (starring Olivia Coleman who is on narrating duties for this film), and drama series Giri/Haji, offers just that.Charting the tragic life of Louis Wain, an artist-cum-inventor who was plagued with mental health problems, Sharpe’s film has a magical, surrealist, Dickensian quality. Much like Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been described as “the most improbable story that has ever happened in the art market”, and The Lost Leonardo reveals every twist and turn of this extraordinary tale. In New Orleans in 2005, a badly-damaged painting (pictured below left) sold at auction for $1,175. It was listed as a copy of a Leonardo da Vinci, but the buyers – dealer Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, who searches for overlooked masterpieces – believed it might be the real thing, a painting known as Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) by the Renaissance master himself.Even Parish admits the idea was ludicrous. “ Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Joseph Losey’s career covered a great deal of ground, and several continents. From The Boy with the Green Hair, a noirish sci-fi film from 1948, through to his richly psychological collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), he navigated an outsider’s route, rooted in 1930s left-wing connections – after he had studied with Bertolt Brecht and worked extensively in the American theatre. He was also a master of the thriller, and some of his best (and under-rated) films include The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and The Criminal (1960), both made in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Schumacher’s skiing accident in December 2013, which left the seven-times Formula One world champion with a severe brain injury, added a shocking postscript to one of the greatest stories in motor racing. Having survived a decades-long driving career which included numerous accidents (including a motorcycle smash in 2009 which was apparently far more serious than the Schumi camp would admit), he was near-fatally stricken on a family Christmas holiday in Méribel.His wife Corinna is one of the main contributors to Netflix’s new bio-doc, and while she sheds some light on their life Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rivalled only by Titanic and La La Land for its 14 Oscar nominations, 1950's Best Picture-winner All About Eve is a film that audiences and reviewers love – even though Joseph L Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay makes no bones about the fact that he thinks both fans and critics are less than loveable.Broadway star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is dismissive of the admirers who hang around the stage door: “Autograph fiends, they’re not people. Those are little beasts that run around in packs like coyotes". Later on, professional critics are described as needing to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This Danish police drama attempts to tackle the country’s uneasy relationship with the immigrants it’s allowed into its cities over the last 30 years. The result is a somewhat clumsy attempt at fusing social commentary with the visceral thrills of an action movie, complete with car chases, shoot outs and muscle-bound fistfights.The title is the Arabic word for police and Shorta opens with a close up of a black teenager, Talib Ben Hassi, shouting "I can’t breathe" as he's held down on the floor by a white officer. It’s a little cheap to reference a real-life atrocity for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from Ferdinand von Schirach’s bestselling 2011 novel, The Collini Case is a riveting mix of character study and legal drama, carefully blended into a historical perspective reaching forward 60 years from the 1940s. At its core is the so-called Dreher Law, a sinister legacy from the Nazi era which, cunningly evading democratic scrutiny in Germany’s Bundestag, was a device for erasing murders committed under the Third Reich from the records.Directed with sensitivity and acuity by Marco Kreuzpaintner, the story is seen through the eyes of Caspar Leinen (Elyas M’Barek), a naive young Read more ...