Film
Matt Wolf
There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. A dark comedy about a father who risks destroying the daughter he also clearly loves, the movie rides multiple shifts in tone with remarkable ease. You can only imagine the cringe-making American remake that with luck does not await. The title character is in fact the forbidding-looking alias of Winfried Conradi (Peter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the extras on the DVD release of The Wailing, South Korean director Na Hong-Jin says, “Every genre of film has its own strengths and weaknesses. By combining many genres you could say that I was able to build and emphasise the strengths, while diminishing the weaknesses.” And indeed, over its monumental 156 minutes, The Wailing attempts to meld comedy, an overt homage to The Exorcist, zombie movie tropes and social commentary. Unfortunately, the different stylistic elements play off against each other instead of melding into a cohesive whole, making The Wailing lack consistent tension.The Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Loving is not just a love story, it’s also the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple from Virginia who got married in 1958. Richard was white, Mildred was not, and because interracial marriage was banned in Virginia, they were both arrested under the anti-miscegenation laws. Eventually the landmark case went to the Supreme Court and the ruling changed the face of America – a reminder in these deranged times that US lawyers can make justice work. Director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) dramatises the facts with restraint, drawing on Nancy Buirksi’s 2008 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Matthew McConaughey has already had a go at hunting for gold (on film, at any rate) in 2008's Fool's Gold, where he and Kate Hudson were on the trail of a sunken Spanish galleon full of treasure. Critics were unsympathetic ("excruciatingly lame" was a fairly typical response).McConaughey will fare a bit better this time around, but even though he popped into a critics' screening to tell us that his role of gold prospector Kenny Wells is his all-time favourite, what might have been a rip-roaring yarn seems to have wandered off aimlessly into the undergrowth somewhere along its two-hour running Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It has Brian De Palma’s greatest shock ending since Carrie, and an Alec Guinness-worth of John Lithgow psychopaths – yet 1992’s Raising Cain is rarely remembered among the director’s best works. I last came across it midway through, late at night on TV, unsure of quite what I was seeing, and sent reeling to sleep. Watching from the start hardly steadies the Chinese-box dream-sequences and vertiginous violence, as nice child psychologist Dr. Carter Nix (Lithgow) tries to survive his relationship with nasty twin brother Cain (Lithgow), cruel Norwegian dad Dr. Nix (Lithgow) and adulterous wife Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Twelve months ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was the focus of an intense campaign on social media. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite protested the lack of recognition for black talent at the 2016 Oscars. This year the picture looks a little different, mainly because Barry Jenkins's quietly remarkable film Moonlight has deservedly scooped eight nominations.Among those nominees is Naomie Harris, who plays Paula, a crack addict in the Miami projects. But the main acting miracle of Moonlight is the trio of performances by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders (pictured below) and Trevante Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his.There couldn’t be a more iconic signature for a career spent giving birth to weirdos, wackos, outsiders, victims, lunatics and flamboyants. Quentin Crisp, Caligula, Profumo-suicide Stephen Ward, Elephant man John Merrick Read more ...
theartsdesk
This weekend T2: Trainspotting is released in cinemas. It's taken 21 years for novelist Irvine Welsh, director Danny Boyle, scriptwriter John Hodge and the famous cast to get back together. That's not actually that long, though. This year Blade Runner 2049 is promised following a gap of 35 years after Ridley Scott's original film. Dick Van Dyke is heading for the UK to take a part in Mary Poppins Returns 64 years on, this time starring Emily Blunt in the title role.In this edition of Listed we trawl through the archive for the longest waits in cinematic history. On grounds of artistic merit, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Victor Erice is one of the great Spanish directors of the last century, though much less prolific than his compatriots Buñuel and Almodóvar. There are three key films, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Quince Tree Sun and El Sur (The South). All three are characterised by an intense attention to the act of seeing, the mystery of presence and the power of the imagination. They are slow, beautiful films – every frame a delight – that benefit a great deal from being seen on a large screen or in the cinema. The lighting of interiors is often dramatic, conjuring an introverted and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.Not that Gibson, as director, is doing anything very different to what he's always done. Hacksaw Ridge is a story of religious faith under pressure, and of imperturbable heroism in the face of extreme violence. Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is Read more ...