Film
Saskia Baron
All is harmony as another day breaks in paradise. Kong yawns and stretches luxuriously, his furry brown musculature surely paying homage to Burt Reynolds’ iconic yet discreet Playgirl centrefold. Bobby Vinton croons Over the Seas over invisible speakers as the giant ape showers in a waterfall. If only Godzilla vs. Kong had continued in this genre, a relaxing portrait of life in an Eden where a lonely primordial primate’s main problem is that he can’t get trousers to fit him. But sadly this is not that kind of film. Kong’s nemesis, Godzilla, that scaly creature who has Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Drifters remakes the romance crime genre by placing the main themes of rebellion and freedom in the context of the race and migration divisions of present day Britain. It is a noble mission for a debut by British director Benjamin Bond. Sadly, this film never gets close to succeeding in either developing a unique aesthetic, or engaging robustly in politics.We begin in an English language class in London, where the Parisian waitress Fanny (Lucie Bourdeu) and African migrant Koffee (Jonathan Ajayi) meet and quickly fall in love. They are both escaping pasts of suffering. Fanny has a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether he’s making documentaries or dramas, director Kevin Macdonald has an eye for the bleak moments in our history, and a dynamic way of recreating them, from the Oscar-winning doc Four Days in September, about the Munich massacre, to the fictionalised account of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, which at times played like a horror film.Compared to those, The Mauritanian feels pretty conventional, a tale of righteous lawyers and their ill-treated client, amid the well-trod US malfeasance in its War on Terror. Yet there’s no denying the almost Read more ...
graham.rickson
Silent Action makes for a snappier title than the original La polizia accusa: il Servizio Segreto uccide, though the frenzied action in Sergio Martino’s 1975 thriller is anything but silent. The film opens with the grisly murders of three Italian army officials, the third and bloodiest showing us the unconscious victim placed on a railway line and decapitated by an oncoming train. On the case is Luc Merenda’s improbably good-looking Inspector Solmi, all flowing locks and chiselled features. Solmi’s smooth features are deceptive; he’s a foul-mouthed maverick and good with his fists.Sit through Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The problem with much neo-noir is that it’s ersatz – too self referential for its own good. Peter Medak’s noir is as dark as it gets, but the hell he portrays is a shade too knowing, tainted with irony and excess.Romeo is Bleeding (1994) showcases a slimline and youthful Gary Oldman. He's always good on screen, here as Jack Grimaldi, a cop so bent that he hardly remembers what it is to be straight. His opponent is the best thing in the movie: Swedish actress Lena Olin as a ruthless and sizzlingly sexy hit-woman. Medak is good at erotic tension, and the scenes in which the über-sadistic hired Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“Forgotten We’ll Be”), more literally catches the mood of the writer’s tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and prominent social reformer who was murdered by paramilitaries in his native town of Medellin in 1987.The writer realised that, two decades after his father’s death, his achievements were starting to be forgotten, even in close Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a dog’s life, this lockdown; if only I could meet my friends whenever I want to and roam around freely without obeying these annoying restrictions! Stray is a documentary about the street dogs of Turkey in which film-maker Elizabeth Lo plays with our preconceptions about the relative merits of life as a dog and a person, especially now that our freedoms are being curtailed and our lives controlled more than ever.Shot mainly in Istanbul, her pavement-level view of the city suggests, in fact, that feral dogs may have something to teach us about freedom, choice and independence. For Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.Based on the tantalising existence of an English finishing school for daughters of German higher-ups and the like that shut its doors in 1939 just prior to England's entry into World War Two, the director Andy Goddard's quasi-thriller suggests The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The late Weimar-era film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was visionary – a delicate Queer love story set in a repressive girls’ boarding school that denounced the Prussian militarist creed as dehumanising. Like The Blue Angel (1930), another German early talkie classic in which sexual energy confronts authoritarianism, Leontine Sagan’s film contained intimations of Nazism. Foreshadowing the Hitler Youth, the schoolboys who unwittingly steer their complacently bourgeois master toward sexual humiliation and death in The Blue Angel have less corruptible counterparts in the daughters of poor Read more ...
graham.rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This heartfelt documentary follows twin girls who are just starting primary school. We first meet Amber struggling to pop her head through her shirt, helped by her sister Olivia. Amber has Down Syndrome and everything is just that bit harder for her; not just dressing, but understanding what cake her dad wants when they’re playing with her toy grocery shop. Olivia, who provides fragments of voice-over in an otherwise narration-free film, worries that other girls at school are mean and tease her sister. Her filmmaker father, Ian Davies, reassures Olivia from behind the camera that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for several Academy Awards. David, played by wonderful seven-year-old newcomer Alan Kim, has a heart problem that causes his parents, especially his mother Monica (Yeri Han) to worry about him constantly.They have plenty of other worries too. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun; Sorry to Bother You, Burning, Okja, The Walking Dead) has brought his family from South Read more ...