Film
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a story of an adorable dachshund and her cross-country travels, divided into four parts. So far so cute, but as this is a Todd Solondz movie, it doesn’t stay that way. Kids, avert your eyes. The dog’s first home – and the most impressive part of the film – is with lonely young Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) who’s recovering from cancer. He names her Weiner-Dog and they bond (the first shot of Remi is of him lying on bright green grass in a pose straight out of Boyhood, though similarities end there). But control-freak dad (Tracy Letts) is an owner from hell, even though it was he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right.The first film's odyssey of a bunch of Edinburgh heroin addicts yawed vertiginously between horror and farce, though its pounding pop-culture veneer Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in. In a disjointed, non-chronological way – the assassination scene keeps recurring – it’s framed through the lens of Jackie’s interview for Life magazine.The unnamed journalist (an unsympathetic Billy Crudup) is based on Theodore H Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having Read more ...
Jasper Rees
La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years. Unless you have a heart of reinforced teak, its silk-and-honey songbook will seep into your consciousness and stay there, from the rapturous overture “Another Day of Sun” via Mia’s beautiful song “Audition” and the perky love duet “Lovely Night” all the way through to Mia and Sebastian’s bitter-sweet theme tune.The film is the college dream of director Damien Chazelle and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On screen, two hoodlums in macs and homburgs debate the best way to waste a victim. One of them, played by Peter Sellers, proffers a revolver. The other, who from under his hat has something of Herbert Lom about his profile, pulls on a cigarette and shakes his head. How about the acid in the bath routine? Another shake of the head. Case him in cement and drop him in the river? No. Sellers’ gangster is bemused. No gun, no acid, no cement: so how’s he going to do it? At this point the Lom lookalike removes his hat and reveals himself as the husband of the sister of the Queen. “Mind your own Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an event at the heart of Manchester by the Sea that cannot be spoken about, either here or by any character who is a witness to it. But it explains why Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has withdrawn into a state of catatonic frigidity. He is so cut off from the world around him he can barely persuade a muscle on his face to twitch. Only if he sinks enough beers is he roused to start thumping people in bars before returning to his dingy one-room apartment. We’re a long way from La La Land, this week’s other five-star movie out in time for the Oscars.Lee is not entirely incapable of action Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is the highest-grossing film produced exclusively in New Zealand, and yet it snuck into UK cinemas at the back end of 2016 with less fanfare than it deserved. Its release as a home entertainment gives a better shot at a long life. It stars Sam Neill as Hec, an ornery old backwoodsman who reluctantly takes charge of Ricky, an unruly orphan thrust into his care. Neill has never been more loveable, but the charm of the film rests just as much on the unfettered performance of Julian Dennison as the boy.Naturally they have nothing in common, but as they go on the run in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.If a gangster movie could ever be described as a “romp”, Live by Night would be that film, as it vaults across the Prohibition years of the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance. That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same Read more ...