dogs
graham.rickson
Wendy and Lucy is a road movie with a protagonist who’s unable to move on, and a study of friendship where one half of the partnership is mostly absent from the screen. Originally released during the 2008 financial crisis, Kelly Reichardt’s third feature film is ripe for reissue, its depiction of life on society’s margins more relevant than ever.We’re not told what events have prompted the central character to up sticks from her Indiana home and head north-west with her beloved dog Lucy. As played by Michelle Williams, Wendy is an unconventional runaway. She’s conventionally dressed, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I have two guilty secrets about the theatre – okay, two I’m prepared to own up to right here, right now. I quite enjoy some jukebox musicals and I often prefer schools-oriented, pared back, slightly simplified Shakespeare to the full-scale Folio versions. There – I’ve outed myself!So when I read that Joanna Bowman’s production of the rarely staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona was "a new 80-minute edit that’s the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for families" staged in The Other Place, where the history and iconography of Stratford Upon Avon hangs less heavy in the air, I was intrigued. Read more ...
James Saynor
We root for the rootless Outsider in classical western cinema because the places the Outsider fetches up in are scary dumps of the first order – maybe a medieval grub-hole, a Wild West deadfall or some cantina full of aliens that Harrison Ford drops in on.But the dusty badlands where the Eastwoodian protagonist touches down in Black Dog is in the north-west of China in 2008, and this is a Chinese film from director Guan Hu, maker of patriotic action movies like The Eight Hundred (2020). So how far will his new film go in showing a backwater of his modernising country as a bad-ass dead zone? Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
There’s a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, said Graham Greene, and that ice plays a part in French director Justine Triet’s superb fourth feature, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.Set in the French Alps, the film begins with successful novelist Sandra (an amazing Sandra Hüller, totally inhabiting the role) being interviewed at home by grad student Zoe (Camille Rutherford) for her dissertation. They’re drinking wine and chatting flirtatiously.Then music on a loop, an instrumental version of P.I.M.P. by 50 Cents, invades the chalet. It’s so deafening that the interview can’t continue Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Two elderly men meet in the park while walking their dogs, and become friends. Even when friendship turns to love, the hounds tend to dominate the conversation. It’s hardly the most scintillating set-up for a play.I wanted to like Frank and Percy more. It stars two of our most accomplished and personable actors; it’s quite amusing; and it carries sweet messages about friendship, love and the ability to surprise oneself later in life. And yet, dramatically, writer Ben Wetherill and director Sean Mathias offer little more than a soft-centred character study that doesn’t break free of its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As Australia's greatest comedic export exits the stage, strewing gladioli, a promising contender for that title makes an entrance, trailing a dog on wheels. The dog is the titular Colin from Accounts, for the few who still haven’t tried this exceptional, refreshingly mature comedy. Why has this eight-parter from a husband and wife team seemingly overnight occupied a place in British hearts that even Canada’s Schitt’s Creek didn’t manage until its last year of transmission? And that show had lockdown blues to speed it along. They aren’t unalike: both have a core of geniality cut with Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a dog’s life, this lockdown; if only I could meet my friends whenever I want to and roam around freely without obeying these annoying restrictions! Stray is a documentary about the street dogs of Turkey in which film-maker Elizabeth Lo plays with our preconceptions about the relative merits of life as a dog and a person, especially now that our freedoms are being curtailed and our lives controlled more than ever.Shot mainly in Istanbul, her pavement-level view of the city suggests, in fact, that feral dogs may have something to teach us about freedom, choice and independence. For Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack London’s original novel was a brutal and Darwinian account of a dog's life in the Klondike during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. Chris Sanders’s film, on the other hand, with a screenplay by Michael Green, is a family-friendly entertainment in the Saturday matinee tradition, delivering a message of lump-in-the-throat positivity reminiscent of earlier canine classics like Old Yeller or The Incredible Journey.Harrison Ford gets top billing and delivers the somewhat sententious voice-over which pushes the story along, but the real star is Buck (pronunciation of whose name Read more ...
graham.rickson
Keda’s already in trouble for not living up to his father’s expectations. And then there’s an unfortunate clash with an angry bison which sends him careering down a steep cliff face and left for dead. Welcome to Upper Paleolithic Europe. Albert Hughes’s Alpha doesn’t contain many narrative surprises; its plot involving a lost boy struggling against the odds to get back home is straightforward in the extreme.Keda’s essential decency is signalled early on via chiselled cheekbones and glossy hair. Kodi Smit-McPhee succeeds brilliantly in bringing him to life, which can’t be easy when he speaks Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that is, apart from his trusty sheepdog Zafrana and Andalusian donkey Gorrión.It’s such a bizarre idea, in fact, that a travel agent whose help the old man attempts to enlist worries he’s being pranked. But what’s most successful, and memorable, about Chico Pereira’s poignant documentary – co-produced by the Scottish Documentary Institute, and winner Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.The authorities of the wider conurbation provoke distrust – kickbacks and dirty Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This isn't a feature about London's former docklands (although much of it was made in a studio nearby), but rather Wes Anderson's second foray into stop-motion animation (after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox) and a quiet hymn to two of his heroes, Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyasaki. Fittingly, it is set in Japan.It's 20 years into the future; Megasaki is a huge metropolis ruled by a totalitarian mayor (voiced by Kunichi Nomura), who so hates dogs that he manufactures panic about “dog flu” and “snout fever” and then banishes canines to Trash Island, a rat-infested post-apocalyptic rubbish Read more ...