film directors
Graham Fuller
Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot uses irony and visual poetry to condemn his nation’s militarism. Twenty months after the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, it opens in the UK trailing a divisive history. When it first emerged in 2017, it was condemned as un-Israeli by then culture minister Miri Regev. She was subsequently barred from the ceremony for the Ophir awards (the Israeli Oscars), at which Foxtrot won eight prizes, including Best Picture.The film was designed as a triptych. The first section focuses on the grief of a well-to-do Tel Aviv couple, Michael and Daphna (Lior Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.Volume Two of the BFI’s monumental and impressive edition of Jarman’s video and film work will add to his status as genius and martyr. This lovingly assembled collection completes a remarkable account of the director’s work with the moving image, an extraordinary oeuvre as he was also writing Read more ...
Owen Richards
A British boys boarding school in the 1980s. Not the most obvious setting for a romantic comedy, especially one based on the most famous romcom of all, Cyrano de Bergerac. But for director Toby Macdonald, it was the ideal challenge for his debut feature following the BAFTA-nominated short Heavy Metal Drummer.Old Boys stars Alex Lawther as Amberson, an unpopular squirt of a boy struggling to wade through the school’s various allegiances and sports. Life takes an upturn on the arrival of Agnes (Pauline Etienne), the daughter of the new French teacher. She’s interesting, arty, and quite honestly Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As journalists and critics were enjoying the unseasonably balmy weather in Berlin at the 69th Film Festival, all were wondering – where are all the good films? Surely outgoing festival director Dieter Kosslick would want to conclude his 18-year tenure by going out on a bang? Apparently not.Berlin has never had the glitzy attraction of Cannes or the Oscar-hungry titles of Venice and Toronto. Still, journalists and critics have flocked to the German capital each year. This is because Berlin is a festival where you expect to find challenging, demanding, and revitalising cinema. Cinema that gets Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Tides tells of fortysomething angst and camaraderie, though “tells” might be an exaggeration. In a concerted attempt to make a film with minimal incidents and structure, first-time feature director Tupac Felber made a likeable observational piece, based mostly on improvisation, rather than a compelling “watch”.Over a long summer weekend, Jon (Jon Foster), matey but highly-strung, and his quiet and equable friend Zooby (Jamie Zubairi) travel on a barge along some lovely Surrey waterways. They are joined by their cheerful, mouthy woman pal Red (Robyn Isaac), and the self-contained Simon (Simon Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Films that show a young couple’s love deepening are rare because without personal conflict there’s no narrative progression. They're especially rare in the current mainstream American cinema since romantic dramas are commercially risky, though LGBTQ entries like Carol and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, following Brokeback Mountain, have found strong critical favor. Set in Harlem, mostly in the early 1970s, Jenkins’ latest, If Beale Street Could Talk, forcefully bucks the anti-romantic trend with its story of passionate soulmates Tish Rivers and Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (KiKi Layne and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene.We open at the Art Basel Miami Beach, where art snobs with fat wallets glide from room to room with glazed eyes as they gaze at the objet d'art. There's a talking robot exhibit Hobo Man, and a giant polished silver orb pocked with holes you can stick your arm into - what it does it mean? No one cares much, it’s about how much it’s worth. It’s all incredibly pointed and fun, with Gilroy showing up the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.On Her Shoulders is a new documentary about Nadia’s plight, and specifically the amount of travelling, planning and interviewing she subjects herself to just to keep Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) dresses as a woman while dancing with her gentlewomen in her private quarters. Straining credibility, Mary is even tolerant when, on her wedding night, Darnley takes Rizzio to bed instead of her. She responds, a day or two later, by thumping his chest so hard that he angrily Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Dallas writer-director Yen Tan has brought 1985 back to stylistic basics, and the resulting resolute lack of adornment enhances his film’s concentration on a story that achieves indisputably powerful, and notably reserved emotion. Independent cinema through and through, it’s economical in every sense and thrives on excellent all-round performances.Tan’s drama of family relations, set at the moment when the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was gradually becoming clear to Middle America, takes us back three decades, and there’s a similar feel to the visual style that he and his cinematographer ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It can be fascinating to see ourselves as others see us. In this case, Athens-born director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster) brings his acute eye to the English country-house period drama in a scintillatingly warped portrait of the dysfunctional court of Queen Anne.It’s the beginning of the 18th century, and England is struggling with the increasing costs of war with the French. The ageing and mentally erratic Anne (Olivia Colman) quails at the prospect of decision-making as preening politicians screech and chatter around her, wrestling for political advantage and Read more ...