Film
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of Downfall, which has since made all Anglophone portrayals of the Third Reich look dismally bogus. So it’s of note that Downfall’s director Oliver Hirschbiegel, having taken leave of his senses to make Diana, has turned his attention to the lesser-known attempt on the Führer’s life.Georg Elser’s attempt to kill Hitler took place on 8 November 1939 in Read more ...
David Nice
Pallid figures in striplit rooms with too much empty space: if you’ve seen a Roy Andersson film before, you’ll know what to expect from his latest essay on the human comedy. Truly human the film becomes only by cautious degrees, even if we start out laughing at rather than sighing with characters like the hapless salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holge Andersson), who only want people to have fun with vampire teeth, a bag of laughs and a sinister rubber mask. It’s a bit like a sketch show with running gags, but instead of diminishing returns this meditation on harsh, sad existence Read more ...
ellin.stein
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father. As with all such biopics of artists, it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Post-Blitz London starts as a playground and ends as a shadowy nightmare for 12-year-old Frankie (Andrew Ray). The Yellow Balloon is both a fine film about children and Britain’s second X certificate release, not really a contradiction as it shrugs off its early disguise as a kids’ adventure yarn to explore how vulnerable a child’s life can be.Frankie is the happy son of loving parents Ted and Em (Kenneth More and Kathleen Ryan), given sixpence to buy a yellow balloon. A swift sequence of thoughtless misadventures leave his friend a corpse fallen from a bombed-out building, watched by crooked Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.Which makes his latest, P’tit Quinquin, a departure indeed, both in mood and format. Though thematically the comedy is distinctly dark, its sense of the absurd is often laugh-out-loud funny, resulting in an ambiguous feeling Read more ...
ellin.stein
US films about and aimed at African Americans broadly fall into two categories: gangsta life in the ‘hood action flicks and broad comedies, the latter niche dominated by Tyler Perry, who does for Black Americans what Mrs Brown does for Irish women. Dear White People, on the other hand, is a sophisticated social satire in the vein of Spike Lee’s early She’s Gotta Have It or Bamboozled. It’s packed with ideas and waspish observations worthy of (in a somewhat different context) the Dowager Countess of Downton, and if the social commentary and media critique sometimes threatens to overwhelm the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Since his debut Honour of the Knights back in 2006 Catalan director Albert Serra has carved out a niche for himself, creating cinema that is frequently oblique and visually engrossing. Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort), which won the director the Golden Leopard at the Locarno festival two years ago, looks like his most approachable film to date – it includes considerably more language than his previous works, as well as a touch more narrative – but still reveals itself slowly.There’s no direct revelation until well in as to the identity of its main character, the inimitable 18th- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Last year’s Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) played out in the shadow of conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and a year on you could be forgiven for wondering if anything’s really changed. International sanctions remain in place – in fact they were renewed for another six months right in the middle of MIFF’s late-June run, and much alluded to by festival president Nikita Mikhalkov throughout proceedings.Funding issues reflecting Russia’s economic recession saw the festival itself shortened by two days, and its main competition programme reduced to a dozen films. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Oh Arnie. For two terms Arnold Schwarzenegger retooled himself as the Governator who could save California from debt, drought and Democrats. By the time his term ended, the Californian exchequer was reduced to rubble. A bit, in fact, like the Golden Gate bridge at the start of Terminator: Genisys. When the Terminator said he’d be back he wasn’t wrong. But this time he’s leading a project that’s only pretending to destroy California’s infrastructure.In fact it’s more complicated than just being back. Schwarzenegger is back and he's forth in a time-switching plot that commutes between 1984, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t think I could handle it, I think I’d go mad.” It’s the sort of answer given by anyone asked how they’d react to fame. With the possibility looming of recognition beyond jazz circles, Amy Winehouse, who was then not so well-known, responded with something which could have appeared trite; the humble words of an aspirant not wanting to seem too big for her boots.What came later is well known. Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on 23 July 2011 after a too public decline which seemingly realised her prediction. Those off-the-cuff words in an interview took on a resonance few would have Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
No-one could joke about the tragic aspect of Orson Welles’s career, the fact that his inestimable promise had only been partially realised, better than Welles himself. Once, when asked about the outrage following his panic-inducing radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, the director quipped, “I didn’t go to jail. I went to Hollywood.” And that was punishment enough.Welles, the boy wonder turned studio pariah, who nevertheless has more truly great films to his name than most filmmakers, was born 100 years ago: the BFI is marking the centenary with the retrospective Orson Welles: The Great Read more ...