film directors
Saskia Baron
This is a very enjoyable documentary about how the cerebral British filmmaker John Boorman found himself directing one of the biggest Hollywood flops of the 1970s when he took on the sequel to The Exorcist. Acclaimed for stylish, taut dramas like Point Blank and Deliverance, Boorman had also shown that he was not afraid of exploring other genres with his sci-fi dystopia Zardoz. But satanic horror perhaps wasn’t the best fit for him and when Warner Bros (who had made a fortune with the original film) came looking for a director for The Heretic: Exorcist II, they came to regret their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Movieland’s canon of dog movies is long and varied, from 101 Dalmations and Bolt to The Incredible Journey, Eight Below and Walt Disney’s heart-rending 1950s classic Old Yeller. In Heart of the Beast, Brad Pitt teams up again with director David Ayer, who directed his gritty World War Two Sherman tank movie Fury, and finds a special kind of true love with a lion-hearted German Shepherd called Odin. Brad plays James Belmont, a US Special Forces veteran who remains battered and bruised from his battlefield experiences. Odin (whose real name is Uber) was a “combat scouting dog” who was by Read more ...
James Saynor
Here’s something you don’t see every day at the cinema: a filmmaker tells a boring story, then makes the whole point of the film about telling a boring story. Pedro Almodóvar is known for busy, gymnastic storytelling that can sometimes be so heightened it borders, in his own words, on “hysteria”. So maybe it’s logical that, here, he’s come round to the reverse of that – a kind of anti-story featuring storytellers who are not that good at stories.One of Almodóvar’s many projects, when he’s not mixing together his favourite, fervid elements (sordidness, mothers, love, death, ruthlessness, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s Cornish cinema, lost boats, drowned men and ways of life wash back in with the tide, nothing truly gone. Where his feature debut Bait (2019) tackled the violence stirred by second-home gentrification in a humiliated fisherman and Enys Men (2022) found elliptical folk-horror in tin mine echoes, Rose of Nevada falls through time in a fishing village which is barely hanging on.The new work is Jenkin’s biggest production by far, but still homemade in mainstream terms. Two name actors, George MacKay and Callum Turner, lead his cast for the first time, fitting happily into his Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.Loznitsa describes it as a "typical Russian fairy tale", one that evolved as the bureaucratic nightmarishness evoked by Gogol, as well as Kafka, kept creeping into his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bart Layton’s class-conscious pulp fiction gives Chris Hemsworth his most convincing lead role since Thor as Mike Davis, an LA jewel thief on one last job while tentatively facing his hollow life. An all-star cast including Marvel compadre Mark Ruffalo, pictured bottom right, and Halle Berry happily sink into character parts to give the familiar heist set-up flesh and bone.Mike’s ice cool hijacking of high-end diamonds along LA's 101 freeway almost gets him a bullet right at the start. His empty, expensive apartment, glum servicing by a prostitute and hand-wringing discomfort on an actual Read more ...
Graham Rickson
The Straight Story is the slowest of road movies, its elderly protagonist crawling 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin at just five miles per hour. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney based their script closely on a true story, that of 73-year-old Alvin Straight, who made his journey riding a lawnmower upon hearing that his estranged brother had suffered a stroke. Sweeney’s then-partner David Lynch was intrigued and took on directorial duties. This is a real outlier in his output, a colleague describing it as “the one Lynch film that isn’t perverse in some way”, the finished product deemed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fabled for (among other things) The Evil Dead, Darkman and Spider-Man, Sam Raimi made his last appearance as a director on 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was one of the biggest hits of his career. Designed on a slightly smaller scale, Send Help may not overtake it commercially, but it mixes horror and black comedy with a castaway-survival theme to devastatingly entertaining effect. The twin leads, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien, squeeze maximum mileage from their contrasting roles.Our story centres on Linda Liddle (McAdams), who works in the Strategy and Planning Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The first time you see Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value you want to catch her, hug her, slap her (as her character requests), or do anything to calm her down. Reinsve plays Nora, an actress suffering from horrific stage fright moments before she steps on stage in front of an audience to play the lead in a new play. Nora doesn’t fear failing; she passed that point some time ago. What freaks her out is the risk of losing control over her deepest emotions and being reminded of her vulnerability. The reason for Nora's turmoil is twofold. Her mother recently died, and she has to deal Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Family crises and relationship breakdowns are familiar subjects for films to tackle. Both are central to Aribam Syam Sharma’s 1990 feature Ishanou (The Chosen One), where divine intervention wreaks havoc on a middle-class family living in India’s remote north-eastern Manipur province. Husband and wife Dhanabir and Tampha (Kangabam Tomba and Anoubam Kiranmala) are celebrating their young daughter’s transition to adulthood by having her ears pierced as part of a Meitei religious ceremony. Tension between the pair is signalled early on when Tampha rebuff’s Dhanabir’s attempts to embrace her. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.
The Gaza War meant director Annemarie Jacir filmed under duress, with her original West Bank village set overrun by Jewish settlers and Jordan standing in, before a defiant return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The war impacted Jacir in subtler ways, emotionally entailing a straightforward film shorn of levity or experiment. The result is a low-budget equivalent to David Lean, less interested in Lawrence of Read more ...