The 30th anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky – the great Russian director died just before the end of 1986, on December 29, in Paris – will surely guarantee that his remarkable body of work receives new attention, and this month distributor Artificial Eye launches a programme, Sculpting Time, which will see new digitally restored versions of his seven films being re-released around the country.
film reviews
Jasper Rees
Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.
The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and creator of McSweeney’s magazine, is not the type of writer whose prose personality just leaps onto the screen. But in his wonderfully alive opening sequence (see clip overleaf) scriptwriter/director Tom Tykwer seems determined to lassoo lightning. To the backing of Talking Heads, Boston salaryman Alan Clay (Hanks) karaokes “Once in a Lifetime” in a harum-scarum nightmare sequence featuring cartoon SFX and a juddering rollercoastcam. In barely a minute it’s established that Alan, divorced and broke and with a horrible ex-wife, is heading to Saudi Arabia to secure a deal to supply the tech for a new city in the desert. For him it’s an alcohol-free last-chance saloon to pay for his daughter to go back to college. “I need you strong and bright here, Alan,” his boss tells him.
While Alan makes no professional headway, he is troubled by a lump in his back which is only worsened by emergency self-surgery and contraband moonshine. He ends up in hospital where he encounters an enigmatic and sultry female doctor called Zahra (Sarita Choudhury, pictured below).
While Tykwer’s dancing narrative style includes savvy nods to Groundhog Day, A Hologram for the King doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It briefly reports on the hellish conditions suffered by Filipino guest workers and flirts with the difficulty of being a woman in a phallocratic society. But is it in fact an intercultural romance and plea for international understanding, or a soft-centred picaresque adventure about second chances in midlife? It's also that extreme rarity, a Saudi comedy whisked into a shrewd commentary on US impotence as globalisation steals American jobs.
And yet it’s not quite any of the above. Tykwer, who made his name with Run, Lola, Run, has taken on unmanageable novels before in the shape of Cloud Atlas and Perfume. This visit to the Middle East is never quite as flawed as Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, whose quirky charms shrivelled up on screen. DoP Alexander Berner has a fine time pointing his camera at the desert. But it feels like a missed opportunity. Attending a Danish embassy rave, Alan meets Sidse Babett Knudsen’s expat worker (a mostly pointless cameo for Borgen’s statsminister) who attempts to rip his kecks off. “Would you like to hear a really good joke?” he suggests as an alternative to sex. A Hologram to the King seems to know only quite good ones. What’s left is the pleasure of Hanks, the same as he ever was, in an inconsequential shaggy dog tale.
TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
Bridge of Spies. Spielberg's warm-hearted Cold War thriller is lit up by Tom Hanks (pictured below) and Mark Rylance
Captain Phillips. Piracy drama prompts bravura all-action display from director Paul Greengrass and captain Hanks
Cloud Atlas. Star company assumes various guises as David Mitchell's time-travelling masterpiece is lovingly told in under three hours
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is lacking in magic
Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson as PL Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney track the journey of Mary Poppins from page to screen
Sully: Miracle On The Hudson. Eastwood and Hanks are the right men for an epic of understated heroism
Toy Story 3. To infinity and no further: Woody and the gang (sob) go on their final mission
PLUS ONE TURKEY
Inferno. In Dan Brown's dumbed-down Florence, Tom Hanks saves the world. But not the movie
Overleaf: watch the opening sequence of A Hologram to the King
Adam Sweeting
It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.
Matthew Wright
He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend. If you don’t see it on a date, you might just as easily watch it with children, grandparents, or your long-lost step-sister from Patagonia.
Graham Fuller
Teenage girls in the West who routinely abuse their parents for imposing midnight curfews, cancelling suspicious sleepovers, and insisting bra straps be concealed should hope that they are not suddenly dragged along to see Mustang.
Nick Hasted
Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.
Nick Hasted
After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.
Nick Hasted
Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital.
Jasper Rees
John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.
Graham Fuller
Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Dandyism.”