Film
Demetrios Matheou
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of brevity, we’ll call Loony Porn.The film has not only been made during the pandemic but fulsomely features the life of a city outdoors – namely Bucharest – as its citizens routinely engaged in social distancing, face covering and the rest. Accompanied by a plot that touches on parenting, the worse aspects of social media and cancel culture, the result Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A teen comedy with a thematic difference, Moxie has enough memorable moments to firmly establish comedian Amy Poehler as a director worth reckoning with in what is her second film, following Wine Country in 2019. Telling of the teenage Vivian's coming-of-age as a rebel against the landscape of #MeToo, the Netflix movie goes enough of the way towards transforming this genre's familiar tropes that one only wishes it had enough, well, moxie to go still further. There's undeniable pleasure to be had from the collective awakening that transforms the female student body of Rockport High in a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jindřich Polák ’s 1963 film Ikarie XB-1 (also available from distributor Second Run) still seems fresh, a cerebral, visually arresting sci-fi which clearly influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s surprising to read that Polák was actually a comedy specialist, and that the broader, farcical stylings of 1977’s Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem) are more typical of the director’s output. Yes, it’s still sci-fi, but more Carry On than Kubrick. The setup is a good one, with elderly Nazis plotting to travel back in time from the 1990s with a stolen Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a striking interview among the extras for this Criterion edition of Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s fourth and final feature. The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won the top award, the Golden Bear, the previous year. She had only just turned 40 yet speaks about her World War II film with the absolute authority – not least about moral and spiritual subjects – of a figure far more established on the world cinema scene (her achievements to date were remarkable anyway for the hurdles she had overcome as a woman Read more ...
graham.rickson
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig gets an acknowledgement in The Grand Budapest Hotel’s closing credits and if you’ve read Zweig’s Beware of Pity you’ll recognise why, Wes Anderson’s Mitteleuropa setting and penchant for flashbacks within flashbacks framing a complex narrative that becomes more affecting with repeated viewings. There’s an awful lot going on, the film’s 100 minutes taking in below-stairs hotel shenanigans, love story, murder mystery, prison break and a wildly extended chase, and though first released back in 2014, this Criterion reissue confirms its status as a modern classic. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but is that any excuse for a film quite so saccharine? He of all challenging and complex men, with a temperament to match, seems an odd subject for the sort of weightless, paint-by-numbers biopic that would be hard-pressed to muster much attention even as TV filler on a particularly dead night.As it is, made for the screen on what would appear to be astonishingly modest means (let's just say that Hollywood has rarely looked less convincing), this reckoning of Dahl's stormy first marriage to the Oscar-winning American actress Patricia Read more ...
Tom Baily
What did Sia want to achieve with Music, her deeply confused first stumble into filmmaking? The reclusive Australian has enjoyed years of global fame for a successful music career. Was it never enough?Music is about an autistic girl called Music (Maddie Ziegler) who lives a controlled life with her grandmother. When her grandmother (and only carer) dies suddenly, she comes under the care of her wild half-sister Zu (Kate Hudson). Zu is a free spirit who is recovering from a damaged past. A chance to find meaning seems to have arrived in this new role as protector-sibling, but she doesn’t Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can one use the term autofiction about a film? If so, Mogul Mowgli would be a perfect example. Riz Ahmed, the actor who came to fame with Four Lions, has in recent years appeared in a Star Wars spin-off and a Marvel film; he also raps as Riz MC with the transatlantic duo Swet Shop Boys. No stranger to racial stereotyping and the existential questions that beset successful second-generation Asians, Ahmed has now written and produced a formidable portrait of a British-Pakistani performer struggling with his identity when he returns to Wembley after two years Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stuttgart-born auteur and film theoretician Paul Leni, whose illusionistic production designs and direction of Waxworks (1924) helped define German Expressionist cinema, was 44 and approaching master status when he died of sepsis on 2 September 1929. Following its limited Christmas Day 1928 release, Leni’s final film The Last Warning, which was his fourth for Carl Laemmle’s Universal, had been released in January as both a silent and as a part-talkie, but it never won the critical acclaim of his seminal Hollywood horror classics The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
An initially off-putting erotic comedy thriller about the relationship between a webcam dominatrix, “Scarlet” (Julia Fox), and the Internet gambler, Jack (Peter Vack), who becomes obsessed with her, Ben Hozie’s sexually graphic PVT CHAT becomes increasingly resonant as it proceeds – and surprisingly endearing. While mistress and slave are stepping in and out of their roles, they forge a tender online connection from what Jack believes is a distance of 3,000 miles – he lives in downtown Manhattan, she works (she says) out of San Francisco, The interaction of these hustlers elicits Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...