Film
Adam Sweeting
You generally find that a movie with Andrea Riseborough in it is worth a look, and so it proves here. Written and directed by Belfast-born Stacey Gregg, Here Before is a nicely-focused story which plays echoes of the supernatural off against a taut family drama set in a naturalistic, usually rain-dampened Northern Ireland. Refreshingly refusing to outstay its welcome, it profits from recognising its limitations (ie a small budget) and working within them.Laura (Riseborough) and Brandon (Jonjo O’Neill) are maintaining an even strain, keeping the family home ship-shape while bringing up their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Even today, Charlie Chaplin still earns glowing accolades from critics for his work during the formative years of cinema, though a contemporary viewing public saturated in CGI and superheroes might struggle to see the allure of his oeuvre as the “Little Tramp”. Nonetheless, his films such as City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator are built into the foundations of motion picture history.As its title reveals, this new documentary, directed by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, pitches itself as a quest for the “real” Chaplin, surely something of a wild goose chase since Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Publishing this review of In the Realm of the Senses the day after Valentine’s Day feels very strange. Nagisa Ōshima’s 1976 film is about sex and obsession. Sexual games that start with insatiable lust progress to hitting, a choking to death, and a particular kind of dismemberment. What's love got to do with it? Good question.This has to be the film for people in the habit of complaining that what they are watching is not transgressive or provocative enough. Ōshima was setting out to provoke. As Ian Buruma has written, the director's “thwarted political subversion had morphed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
With some films it’s all about the editing, a brisk parade of striking images accompanied by a kinetic score. And then there are films like Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, where the camera stays still and watches the performers watching each other talk.Long, mainly static dialogue scenes mean that every small zoom, edit, or pan draws attention to the moment, highlighting the shift in the director’s gaze. Movies like this bring the essential voyeurism of cinema to the fore; in real life you don’t get to stare at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lots of drama follows well-worn paths; just as we expect that in a tragedy that Chekhov's gun (or variants of it) will deliver the denouement, so we know that in a romcom the two leads will end up together. So – no spoilers, but you know the drill – Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson's characters overcome all sorts of obstacles that could thwart their romance. Only in Kat Coiro's film (based on a graphic novel by Bobby Crosby), it's after possibly the most preposterous set-up yet.But it delivers. Lopez is pop star Kat Valdez, about to marry her equally famous beau, singer Bastian (Maluma), at a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh's second visit to Agatha Christie's oeuvre, was supposed to be released in November 2020 but Covid, a studio sale and some embarrassing revelations about one of its cast members put paid to that. Was it worth the wait? Not really.Oh, it's as sumptuous as Branagh's first Christie adaptation, Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and boasts more gorgeous scenery, but it's noticeably less star-packed. If the cast of the train whodunit were all comfortably seated in Hollywood's first-class carriage, most of the Nile riverboat passengers are, with no disrespect Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. Flee's director Jonas Pohar Rasmussen tells the story of an old school friend, who was smuggled into Denmark in his teens when he was a desperate Afghani refugee. In order to protect his friend, who had a long, traumatic journey and is now a high-achieving academic, Rasmussen has changed his name to Amin, but we’re assured that this is a true story Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Souvenir Part II apparently concludes Joanna Hogg’s fly-on-the-wall drama about a woman film student's emotional evolution as the victim of both her older boyfriend's abuse and the disdain of her male instructors. It’s a psychologically perceptive drama full of acute observations, yet it’s disconcerting in its social complacency.Hogg’s sequel to her semi-autobiographical 2019 drama finds the callow aspiring director Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) channelling her grief for her dead lover, the mysterious drug addict Anthony (Tom Burke), into her film school graduation project. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Elie Wajeman’s moodily lit film noir is, among other things, a great advertisement for the French healthcare system. Doctors in Paris do home visits! Even at night, and even for minor troubles such as a painful leg or stomach upset. It costs slightly more than going to the surgery, but t’inquiète pas, you’ll be reimbursed. Just don't lose your insurance card.Mikaël Kourtchine (Vincent Macaigne), leather-jacketed, bearded and slightly hang-dog, is one of these night doctors and although apparently a devoted father, has been doing more than his fair share of night shifts. Although the film Read more ...
mark.kidel
Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Alain Resnais’s first feature-length film, followed a number of remarkable short documentaries, the most famous of which was Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), a haunting evocation of Nazi terror, and still a reference for the way in which the unspeakable can be powerfully expressed.Another was Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), a beautiful work about the Bibliothèque Nationale, France’s national library – a film about memory, compressed into thousands of book stacks through which Resnais’ camera tracked relentlessly. The same tracking shots re-appear in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Lingui” is the Chadian word for “sacred bonds, the common thread”, a social ideal put to the test here by an illegal abortion. Director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – Chad’s artistic conscience, best-known for A Screaming Man – focuses for the first time on the sort of strong women who raised him, as they wage guerrilla war against cultural and religious strictures. Backstreet abortions were staples of ‘60s British kitchen-sink cinema, signifying grim, grey working-class reality. Haroun’s approach is very different, showing resilience, not bleak despair.We meet our heroine Amina (Achouackh Abakar Read more ...