America
Matt Wolf
Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock. That the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.But there Ritter stood, pulpit to his right, flying-eagle lectern (the symbol of St John the Evangelist) to his left. The numbers of last Sunday’s hymns were still on display. Leonard Cohen liked to mix sex Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year we had Jennifer Lawrence as the queen of the QVC shopping channel in Joy. For 2017, here’s Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, a struggling travelling salesman who went on to become the driving force behind the McDonald's fast-food empire. I’m looking forward to seeing George Clooney as Colonel Sanders.Meanwhile, it’s difficult to pin down this film's objectives with certainty. Director John Lee Hancock and screenwriter Robert Siegel seem to want to celebrate the fine old American virtues of self-reliance, ambition and hard work, while simultaneously depicting Kroc’s progress as a form of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Television audiences love seeing familiar faces in different contexts – whether it’s actors exploring their ancestry in Who Do You Think You Are? or politicians awkwardly busting their moves on Strictly. But there’s always a risk that the camera will reveal more than you’d like. For a political journalist like Andrew Marr, famous for hard-hitting interviews on his Sunday show, allowing director Liz Allen to make a film about his quest to recover fully from the stroke that almost killed him in 2013, required careful consideration.Liz Allen (pictured below) is an award-winning observational Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite having been a rock star since the late Seventies, Chrissie Hynde seems to be an introverted, elusive sort of person. If this Arena profile was anything to go by, she lives as a virtual recluse, positively revelling in solitariness. Like the film, her last album was called Alone.“I spend all my time alone,” we saw her telling Sandra Bernhard, evidently a close friend. “I have nothing else to do. It’s my choice, I like it.” Well good for her, and it does mean she has plenty of time to pursue her recently-found passion for painting (which she’s pretty good at, too). But it didn’t really Read more ...
David Kettle
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten what the original question was anyway.Har’el’s previous documentary Bombay Beach, on a ruined ghost town in southern California, earned high praise for its fantastical visuals and its blurring of reality and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fences is one of the best-known works by playwright August Wilson, part of his Century Cycle of plays exploring 100 years of black American history, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987. Wilson died in 2005, but further gongs greeted the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, including Tonys for its stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Alongside the bulk of the 2010 cast, they reprise their roles of Troy and Rose Maxson in this film version, and both are Oscar-nominated. Washington also directed.The story is set in 1950s Pittsburgh, where an ageing Troy is eking out a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing. Doubly so when you consider that this was one of Jerome Kern’s final scores, with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin which are the film’s one constant pleasure: couplets like “Because of Axis trickery/My coffee now is chicory” are peerless, especially when delivered in brash style by a young Phil Silvers.Gene Kelly plays Danny McGuire, injured in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The writing of Tennessee Williams, said his contemporary Arthur Miller, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”. This American production of Williams’s breakthrough play – a hit on Broadway and at the Edinburgh Festival last summer – does not disappoint in the beauty stakes, drawing both eye and ear to its chamber-work delicacy, translucent as one of Laura Wingfield’s glass animals.The production is directed by John Tiffany, a creative force behind the West End's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and, sure enough, inexplicable things happen here, too. Tom Wingfield ( 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 ...