Film
Matt Wolf
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close. There's no denying Brosnahan's commitment to material that couldn't be further from her star-making work in TV's The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, but you can only tease a spectator along so far before one's patience Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may seem incongruous that a factually-based film about Iraqis battling against murderous Islamic State invaders should have been produced by the Russo brothers, famous for Marvel’s Avengers and Captain America blockbusters. However, Hollywood giganticism is happily absent, and Mosul (Netflix) is a claustrophobically intense battlefield movie which also throws some penetrating light on the terrible costs borne by the long-suffering Iraqis. Writer/director Matthew Michael Carnahan has crafted a spare and purposeful narrative in which character and incident are allowed to tell their own story Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Chilean director Maite Alberdi makes warm, witty, empathetic, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, whose subjects are always surprising. Lifeguard, her first, was about a lifeguard working on the most dangerous beach in Chile, who was actually afraid of water.Tea Time sat in with a group of elderly female friends who had been meeting for monthly tea parties for over 60 years. And The Grown-Ups followed the 40-something "pupils" of a private school for people with Down’s Syndrome, as they navigated love, ambition and the desperate desire to be independent. And now comes The Mole Read more ...
Tom Baily
American Utopia is not your average Spike Lee joint. He has teamed up with David Byrne of Talking Heads to make a concert movie based on Byrne’s lauded Broadway show of the same name, which opened in October 2019 in a limited run. After the success, Byrne invited Lee to direct this screen version. Two unlikely titans match, with good results. Byrne hasn’t lost anything of what he always had, and Spike Lee does interesting things with the camera, but it's hard to avoid envying the real audience we see singing and dancing in the grand Hudson Theatre. I wanted to be there.But who wouldn’t? This Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last time George Clooney was in a space movie, Gravity, he and Sandra Bullock were marooned above Earth and desperate to get home. The Midnight Sky has the opposite dynamic: here Clooney is Earthbound, urgently trying to warn incomers to stay the hell away. As science-fiction premises go, it feels rather apt. With Clooney both sides of the camera, the film itself alternates between the Arctic and deep space, human drama and special effects spectacle, a certain novelty but with doses of sci-fi cliché. It’s quietly proficient rather than awe-inspiring, yet Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Four Broadway denizens resolve to change the world "one lesbian at a time" in the cheerful if often cheesy The Prom, the film adaptation of a recent Broadway musical that continually reminds you of at least a half-dozen similar titles, almost all of which are better (Hairspray, to name but one). That the film is nonetheless entertaining enough is due to material that wears a generous heart on its sleeve and that wants to reach across the aisle, so to speak, to temper bigotry and small-mindedness with dollops of acceptance and a jazz hand or two.Insofar as the film often feels like a none-too- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Frank Marshall might not be the biggest household name, but his footprint on Hollywood is unrivalled. He has produced hits ranging from Indiana Jones and Back to the Future to Jason Bourne and Jurassic World. He also takes occasional forays into directing, such as the madcap Arachnophobia and cannibalistic rugby tale Alive. Who better then to chart the career of The Bee Gees, a band far more influential than ever given credit for?How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a top-tier music documentary, filled with world tours, lost demos and family drama. Marshall expertly balances the band's history Read more ...
graham.rickson
Misdirection is at the heart of Le Cercle Rouge. The Buddhist quote that opens Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 thriller – "when men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day… they will inevitably come together in the red circle” – is fake, written by the director, whose entire career was spent working under a pseudonym. The casting of André Bourvil as Inspector Mattei would have wrongfooted contemporary French audiences, used to seeing the actor in light comedies. Then there’s the celebrated heist sequence, dialogue-free and playing out in real time, the outcome of which may surprise.We first Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The big talking points of Martin Scorsese’s lauded return to the gangster genre, 2019’s The Irishman, were his reunion after 25 years with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and the state-of the-art “de-aging” process that enabled that pair and Al Pacino to play their characters over a period of 30 years. Just as significant as these factors, however, was the new thematic dimension and depth that Scorsese and his collaborators brought to the genre – the perspective of time, the poignancy that comes with the realisation that even killers grow old, become regretful, suffer the effects of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lockdowns must be good for something, right? British writer-director Rob Savage (a 2013 Screen International Star of Tomorrow, factoid fans) has made the most of the unwelcome imposition of our first national incarceration by creating a Zoom-powered horror movie, in which a group of six friends gather around their phones and laptops to stage an internet-powered seance.Previous films such as Unfriended and Searching have deployed computer screens to tell their story, but the idea of using Zoom adds a different dimension, and Savage has cannily exploited the parameters of the setup. The various Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo Mortensen), now living in LA with his husband Eric and their adopted daughter Monica.And that’s one of Willis’s more restrained outbursts. He’s tipping over the edge into enraged, foul-mouthed dementia. Yet somehow his son, a mild-mannered pilot (he was in the air force, not the army, as he reminds his dad) who’s trying to get him to move from his isolated farm in the snowy northeast, is a model of kindness and patience – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Using mobile phones, city-based drug dealers employ kids to ferry their product to rural areas or small towns, in this case Canvey Island and the Thames estuary.Blake was inspired to make the film by his experiences as a youth worker in east London, working at a Pupil Referral Unit for problem children excluded from regular schools. He has assembled an impressive cast of young up-and-coming actors, with Conrad Khan (pictured Read more ...