The pilot and the sniper have a lot in common for Clint Eastwood. In his previous US blockbuster, American Sniper, Chris Kyle’s cool shooting under pressure helped extract his comrades from overwhelming assault in Iraq, as part of at least 160 kills confirmed by him there. On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger kept his head to land his failing airliner on the Hudson, saving all 155 on board.
film reviews
Saskia Baron
The Dardennes brothers' latest tale from the grim streets of the industrial suburb of Liège in Belgium is another quietly powerful masterpiece; it’s perhaps their best film since The Child. Re-edited since it debuted at Cannes to mixed reviews, it fuses elements from social realist cinema, morality play and a whodunit murder mystery. The result is a wholly gripping narrative told with understated eloquence.
The film opens with no introductions: a young woman, stethoscope in ears, is listening to a patient breathe. Beside her is a man wearing a white coat. There’s shouting from outside the room - in the waiting area a little black boy is having a seizure and his mother is distraught. The man in the white coat is paralysed at the sight and does nothing; the young woman (Adèle Haenel) snaps into action. Afterwards she berates the young man (Olivier Bonnaud) and their roles become apparent. She is Dr Jenny Davin, in sole charge of a small practice where most of the patients are on benefits, and he’s Julien a medical student. She tells him, "A good doctor has to control his emotions or you won’t make a proper diagnosis." When the doorbell rings, she tells him sternly not to answer, the evening surgery’s already run an hour later than it should do. Julien storms off, not to return.
The moral dilemmas exposed in the film are worthy of HitchcockThe next day the police turn up; a young African woman with no ID, has been found dead on the bank of the river nearby. Checking the surgery’s exterior CCTV, Dr Davin realises the dead girl was her late-night caller. Adèle Haenel has the most extraordinary facial control: she can subtly convey that lurching sensation when you’re first told bad news, the physical effects of that instant rush of adrenaline. Her eyes flicker, there’s a tiny movement of her mouth as if she’s suppressing the desire to vomit. It’s all done swiftly and subtly and it's mesmerising – for the rest of the film one watches her face, trying to work out what she’s thinking and feeling and how she can survive the world around her. Stricken with guilt about not letting the African girl inside, distressed that no one knows who the victim was and horrified that she’ll be buried in an unmarked, pauper’s grave, Dr Davin embarks on her own quest to find the girl’s murderer and her identity.
Her amateur detective work uncovers connections between her own local patients and the neighbourhood's population of menacing hustlers and petty criminals (pictured above: Dornael with Marc Zinga playing a pimp). The Unknown Girl is almost a Nordic noir in its feel: its ingredients include bleak city streets, illegal immigrants scraping along, cops who don’t want to share information and a neat twist at the end. There are red herrings in terms of suspects and coincidences, which occasionally strain credibility, but Dr Davin like Saga in The Bridge and Sarah Lund in The Killing, is an engimatic central character. She appears to also be an"‘unknown girl" without a back story, friends or family. She is stern and serious with only brief moments when a smile breaks through as a patient shares food with her or offers a coffee. We see her turn down a more prestigious job to carry on working with her impoverished patients and to trace the murdered girl. She takes to camping in the surgery, wearing the same plaid jacket, encountering personal danger on building sites.
The Dardennes brothers are minimalists using naturalistic lighting and no score - the only soundtrack is industrial noises or the swish of heavy traffic on the ring road outside the surgery. Philosophical questions about our responsibility towards others, particularly those living in poverty, run through the film and are left open-ended. The social realism will be familiar to Dardennes’ fans, but the addition of the detective element brings a new narrative energy to their work. The Unknown Girl confronts moral dilemmas worthy of Hitchcock, in particular difficult questions around the code of doctor-patient confidentiality. There’s a rare excursion to the countryside for a re-encounter with Julien, but otherwise this is a relentless and impressive slice of urban noir.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Unknown Girl
Markie Robson-Scott
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men have put down their guns. Or, as the sisters have it, “No peace, no pussy”.
Just like the original, Chi-Raq, co-written with Kevin Willmott, is mainly in verse – yes, verse, though there’s a hiphop/rap soundtrack as well, featuring R Kelly and Mali Music, among others. Samuel L Jackson is Dolmedes, a one-man Greek chorus (pictured below). “Welcome to Chi-Raq, land of pain, misery and strife,” he begins, swinging a cane and wearing the first of a selection of pimped-up suits, ties and hats. Lysistrata (the vibrant Teyonah Parris, recently in Dear White People and formerly Don Draper’s secretary in Mad Men) is the girlfriend of gangsta rapper Demetrius “Chi-raq” Dupree (Nick Cannon), head of the Spartan gang, locked in rivalry with the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes with an eye-patch and a weird giggle).
She is OK with the gang-banging status quo – “Everyone here got a man bangin’ and slangin’ / fighting for the flag / and risking that long zip of the cadaver bag". Then an 11-year-old girl is killed (off-screen – we don't see much violence) in a drive-by shooting. (Last year – in real life – a nine-year-old boy was killed as part of gang retaliation.) The girl’s mother, in a moving performance by Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and seven-year-old nephew were killed in 2008 in gang-related murders (real-life again), scrubs the blood, hyper-real, crimson and foamy, off the pavement. She appeals for witnesses but no one comes forward, even after the local church, led by Father Mike Corrigan (John Cusack, looking very white) offers a reward. Corrigan is based on celebrated Chicago activist Father Michael Pfleger, who was a consultant for the movie and whose foster son was killed by gunfire.
Lysistrata is horror-struck and moved to act, influenced by intellectual Miss Helen (the formidable Angela Bassett, who was also in Lee’s Malcolm X and is now in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close to the Enemy). In one of the more thought-provoking scenes, Miss Helen sees off a vile life-insurance salesman who’s pressurising her to take a policy out on her nephew. Lysistrata unifies the women of the two gangs – this is strictly musical-fantasy land, so nothing makes much sense – and gets them to agree to “deny all rights of access and entrance” because "saving lives is our job, it’s ‘bout breaking strife / givin’ da hood da true meaning of life”. Soon the no-peace-no-pussy cause goes global – Brazil, Lahore, Santo Domingo, Montreal and more are all in on it.
There’s plenty of raunchy dancing, singing, craziness and sex, with strip-joints unable to open because of the edict: “The situation’s out of control / Because I’m in front of an empty stripper pole,” proclaims Dave Chappelle in a cameo, not very funnily. It’s all frenzied, dazzling and finally empty, in spite of Corrigan’s impassioned words from the funeral pulpit about self-inflicted genocide and mass incarceration as a “legal form of lynching”, as well as a scene where real women holding up pictures of their dead children surround Chi-raq.
But Lee doesn’t tackle any of the complex reasons for gun violence – the fracturing of gangs, leaving them leaderless and anarchic; the hopelessness of young men without prospects; the dismantling of public housing. He thinks he can reach more people in a feature film (it’s the first production by Amazon Original Movies) than with a documentary. But why? Lee’s HBO doc about New Orleans after Katrina, When the Levees Broke, was a triumph and gave people a voice. Sadly, I can’t imagine that Chi-Raq is going to reach Lee’s intended demographic – the gang members – nor inspire them to lay down their guns.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Chi-Raq
Saskia Baron
Back in the 1980s Jim Jarmusch was a breath of fresh air. He made quiet, quirky films about young urban Americans that dispensed with the prevailing neon-bright high school romances, jocks and suburbia. He was about as far removed from the John Hughes/John Landis/Porky hit machines as you could get. Jarmusch was saturated in obscure B-movies, modern poetry and played in a band. His breakout feature, Stranger than Paradise, starred the then unknown John Lurie, who over the course of the film drifted from a cold New York to a frozen Cleveland and emerged blinking in the stale sunshine of Florida.
Jarmusch once worked as a teaching assistant to the great Nicholas Ray and shares his collaborative way of working with his performers. He cast musicians like Iggy Pop, Tom Waits and Joe Strummer and unfamiliar foreign actors like Roberto Benigni and Masatoshi Nagase. Fond of the static frame and low angles of Japanese directors like Ozu, Jarmusch’s films were a laconic, sideways contemplation of an America that had slipped out of view. They were sly, funny, lyrical and subtly perceptive portraits of romances between men and women and friendships between men who had got a little bit lost. He grasped the auteur mantle and kept creative control of his films, often shot in monochrome and kept his budgets low. Jarmusch was the quintessential indie director.
Sadly it’s a return to format, not form
When he moved into colour with Mystery Train and Night on Earth, he brought something of William Eggleston’s unnerving vision to the screen. But then came too much critical acclaim; his films became airless and obviously headed for the art house and festival circuit. A tendency to collaborate with actors who brought their own baggage – Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton – and engage in mutual self-indulgence, meant that I haven’t liked a Jarmusch film for a long time.
But there were high hopes of Paterson as it was widely heralded as Jarmusch getting back to his roots. Sadly it’s a return to format, not form. It does hark back to those early films in its emphasis on the poetry of the everyday, but in a stale, self-conscious way. Adam Driver steps in as a John Lurie look-alike, playing Paterson, a former marine turned bus driver who listens in to his passengers’ conversations. Paterson's a poet, and over the course of the week he handwrites his minimalist poems in a notebook between shifts of shuttling his bus around Paterson, a down-at-heel city in New Jersey. He shares the city's name, and sees beauty in its quiet ordinariness – much like William Carlos Williams did when he wrote his epic poem, also called Paterson.
Unfortunately, the echoes, rhymes and coincidences that Jarmusch works into the film grow tiresome and ultimately lead nowhere. Paterson’s wife, played by the beautiful Iranian actress/musician Golshifteh Farahani (pictured above with Driver) dreams of having twin babies and her husband starts to see adult twins everywhere. As a movie, Paterson drifts along and never really gets going. There are neighbourly epiphanies and charmed encounters with black people in bars and launderettes. Paterson takes long walks with the couple's baleful English bulldog and finds domestic delight in his wife's monochrome cupcakes and hand painted shower curtain – it's meant to be enchanting but it's simply fey.
What was charmingly loose-limbed in Jarmusch's earlier films now seems mannered and tired. The poems that scroll onto on the screen as Paterson's own work are by poet Ron Padgett and too opaque. In set dressing and dialogue Jarmusch namechecks two great city poets – Frank O’Hara and William Carlos Williams – and this backfires, making the on-screen poems' banality painfully obvious. In the final scene Masatoshi Nagase, who was so good in Sweet Bean, bumps into Paterson sitting on a bench overlooking the city's historic waterfall. Nagase is a middle-aged tourist who in another of the film's artful coincidences is a poetry fan on a pilgrimage to Paterson. Nagase was once the young punk in Mystery Train searching for Elvis's ghost in night-time Memphis; he's now a bespectacled, middle-aged man. Nagase's cameo appearance brought home the distance between Jarmusch young and old. In short, Paterson is a disappointment.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Paterson
Adam Sweeting
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad).
Markie Robson-Scott
A pale young girl – we see her blurred reflection in a window – is hanging out at a pizza joint. She follows a customer, Joe, a handsome young architect, out to his car, where he’s waiting for his order, and flirts with him, smoking and dancing beside the open window, asking him if he’s married. She's a teenage wastrel in her tiny shorts, ballet slippers and shiny jacket. Next thing – there’s no explicit sex on view – he’s paying for her services and heading home. But she’s taken note of his number-plate and we know there’s trouble ahead.
Adam Sweeting
It's remarkable that the story of Seretse Khama, the king of Bechuanaland, isn't more popularly known, though Amma Asante's film may change all that. The movie opens in a smoggy, gloomy London in 1947, where Seretse (David Oyelowo) is completing his studies in law prior to returning to rule his homeland. Momentous change is in the air in the post-war world, as Europe struggles to rebuild and Indian independence signals sundown on the British Empire.
mark.kidel
First-person documentary must steer the uneasy path between embarrassing confessional, narcissistic self-obsession and work that will resonate beyond the merely parochial context of home movies. The dangers surrounding the genre are of course one of the sources of its potential strength. The intimacy that near-absolute subjectivity affords is a plus. And so is the thrill of perhaps getting a glimpse behind the personae of everyday life.
Jasper Rees
Name seven students in Ravenclaw. Which 14 subjects are on the syllabus at Hogwarts? Create a shopping list of 20 different types of magical sweet. In her Harry Potter stories JK Rowling conjured up an almanack of wizarding facts and figures which, for parents, proved extremely useful during long car journeys or steep mountain climbs (even if this parent didn’t know all the answers). A handy staple was “List 16 magical creatures”. It would keep them going for hours because, if memory serves, Rowling created only 14 of them.
Nick Hasted
Jim Jarmusch has made a memorial to the Stooges, more than a celebration of their brutal prime. His Zen rhythms, which roll so movingly through the upcoming Paterson, aren’t entirely equipped for the blunt trauma of Ron Asheton’s guitar, or Iggy Pop’s penchant for sultry chaos. He’s barely adequate journalistically on the band’s early years, but is on hand for their death, as hard living leaves almost no Stooge standing.