Film
Nick Hasted
This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of their cinematographer Jack Cardiff and a couple of their stock players (Marius Goring, John Laurie), Lewin’s 1951 film is set in Spain “about 20 years ago”, under an “erotic and disturbing” moon, outside its Anglo-American leads’ normal place. When a mysterious Dutchman (James Mason, pictured below) moors off shore, events move outside time, too.The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and iterates, as no other film has done in recent years, the politically incorrect but no less obvious and appalling notion that a woman’s face is her most valuable real estate, the thin, fragile wall that separates her from emotional destitution.A woman effaced, this fable-like drama insists, is a woman invalidated – a theme previously explored, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with Peter Firth's Sir Harry Pearce at its centre. Where, as the Spookfather-in-chief, he had to be.Since Spooks stuck unswervingly to its grand tradition of bumping off leading characters – diehards will still be wiping away a tear at memories of Rupert Penry-Jones's Adam Carter, Richard Armitage's Lucas North and Nicola Walker's Ruth Evershed – Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Confounding expectations from the first frames, Girlhood is the endearingly scrappy and staggeringly beautiful third film from French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) and no relation to Boyhood. Intimate and exuberant, it's a coming-of-age story that takes us into the company and confidences of a quartet of teenage girls. They're part of a community of marginalised minorities living in the rundown Parisian suburbs, and have forged their own alternative family unit as a sanctuary from and defence against domestic abuse, poor prospects, societal assumptions and criminal opportunists. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous adversaries. Despite the inevitable plot-holes and sometimes incredible storylines, Spooks managed to keep itself anchored in the bleak realities of intelligence work, where it was wise to trust nobody and if you were paranoid, that's because the bad guys really were out to get you.As a string of leading actors such as Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Whatever you make of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (Jiao you), it’ll likely have you looking at your watch. If you’re hypnotized by its almost narrative-free, stretched naturalism – stretched so far as to become effectively stylization – part of the interest will be in knowing just how long the director holds some of his crucial scenes; the closing one, wordless and virtually still, must come in at almost a quarter of an hour. If it’s mesmerizing self-indulgence that hits you instead, the question may be when to head for the door when this distinctly testing 138-minute work Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography). It’s a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but as a way of expressing the sheer richness of a life-story, one that overlapped with some of the notable events of the 20th century, encounters with Fascism and Communism, participation in one of the most daring World War II commando raids, imprisonment in Colditz, a complicated sexuality, and 50 years as a writer, it works rather well.It reminded me Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The arrival of Thomas Vinterberg's new treatment of Thomas Hardy's novel has triggered a retro-wallow in John Schlesinger's 1967 version, but happily, that was long enough ago to allow Vinterberg's vision to resonate in its own space. My expectations weren't high, but more fool me. This Madding Crowd rocks.Maybe Vinterberg's Danish perspective was just what the project needed, because the director has adhered to the logic of place and period but skilfully sidesteps the fussy dressing-up and anodyne wallpaper-scenery familiar from too many home-grown costume romps. The 1880s rural Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a quirk of film scheduling, The Duke of Burgundy was out in cinemas the week after Fifty Shades of Grey. While it’s doubtful there will have been much audience overlap, the bigger beast gobbled up every single one of the S&M column inches that season. Now out on DVD, Peter Strickland’s infinitely more nuanced portrait of sub-dom co-dependency - and the concept of the safe word - has a clearer claim on all our attention.Domiciled in an autumnal Euroscape blessedly free of men (actually rural Hungary), Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara d’Anna play Cynthia and Evelyn, a mistress and servant Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A French romantic comedy about immigration? Seeing Samba in election week may not be on Nigel Farage’s to-do list, but that should not deter anyone else. Based on a novel by Delphine Coulin, this is an affectionate and touching look at the absurdities of life as an illegal, and at its heart are two charming performances.A splendid tracking shot which opens the film moves through a blingy hotel from the choreographed celebrations of a very white wedding through to the crowded chaos of the multi-ethnic kitchen. In a minute directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano have deftly ferried us into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ridley Scott’s Biblical epic is dark in every way; couched in shadows, even before the hand of God rolls blackness over Egypt as He slays its first-born. Christian Bale’s Moses is indeed baleful, typically for this often wearisome star, a brooding, barking warrior-prophet. And the Old Testament’s huge capacity for slaughter is rightly seen by Pharaoh Ramesses (Joel Edgerton) as a contest to find whose deity is “better at killing”. It’s a long way from Chuck Heston, as Scott attempts a realist religious film, except when God speaks to Moses in the form of a sinister, petulant child with more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stonehearst Asylum is bookended by classic Hammer horror scenes. Within minutes of Dr Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) being dropped off at the titular, fog-bound mansion by a swiftly exiting coach and horses, he meets a full-blooded Gothic gang: stiff-backed asylum overlord Dr Lamb (Ben Kingsley), his leering henchman Mickey Finn (David Thewlis), and beautiful, sexually terrified Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale). Elsewhere on the premises lurk Dr Salt (Michael Caine) and Mrs Pike (Sinead Cusack). This enviable cast relish Joe Gangemi’s archly witty script, and its finally moving debate on who is Read more ...