film directors
Graham Fuller
A revelatory moment comes hallway through Wildlife when frustrated American housewife Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) is observed standing alone in her family’s backyard by her 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the film’s anxious, steadfast protagonist. Wearing curlers, an off-white sweater and jeans, her face made-up to go out, Jeanette has a harsh, fatalistic look on her face that is new. Initially optimistic, she has been steadily souring on her marriage since her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), too proud to take back the golf pro job from which he was sacked, departed to fight a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Considering how the UK prides itself on having created the "Mother of Parliaments" and its citizens having once chopped off a king's head for thwarting its will, remarkably little is taught in our schools about one of the seminal events on the way to fully democratising this country: the Peterloo Massacre.Mike Leigh's spawling, intricately detailed film will give you a good overview of that appalling day in British history; on 16 August 1819 an undisciplined and badly led group of mounted and foot soldiers – whose commanding officer had a more pressing date at the races – charged with sabres Read more ...
Owen Richards
On 22nd July 2011, on a tiny island off the Norwegian coast, 69 young people were killed, with another 109 injured in a terrorist attack. It was the darkest day in Norway since World War Two, and one that is still evident in its news, politics and society today. But somewhere down the line, the victims became background noise to the circus around the aftermath and perpetrator. It was something that director Erik Poppe could not ignore any longer.Utoya: July 22 is his response. Working directly with the survivors and families, he sought to tell their story and remind people of what really Read more ...
Owen Richards
If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent. However, coherence does not mean it's good. Is the film as bad as some are making out? Well, yes and no.We meet Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek, completely at one with the great one) working at Heathrow Airport, all buck teeth and flamboyant outfits. But he’s not yet the confident Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s not for nothing that Alfonso Cuarón’s mercurial CV includes Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, because this director really knows something about alchemy. His last, the Oscar-winning Gravity, was a science fiction spectacular made oddly intimate by its focus on a lone astronaut in the expanse of space; his latest concerns the travails of a domestic worker in Mexico City, and is a family story with the visual expression of an epic. That versatility and facility are the domain of a master filmmaker. And the glorious Roma may well be Cuarón’s best yet. The Mexican’s Read more ...
Owen Richards
Watching Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum, you’d be forgiven in thinking he was a tortured soul. Lead character Phillip (played by Sean Harris, pictured below) is a lean marionette of a man, prone to horrific flights of fantasy involving a human-headed spider puppet. Nauseating sequences are punctuated by the unmistakable drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, while the significance of a local kidnapping begins to seep into Phillip’s life.In person, whatever dark shades Matthew Holness has are well hidden. As charming as he is self-effacing, he speaks passionately about crafting a film Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth. Its hour and 40 minutes length is never dull, offering up regular revelatory tidbits, but rather than a driving sense of focus and purpose, Greenfield chooses to wander her chosen terrain in a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town. The station-master sets off on his bicycle to warn the inhabitants of the imminent arrival of these strangers. It’s not long after the end of hostilities but Japan has yet to surrender. This little Hungarian town is in limbo, liberated from the Germans but not yet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but gives each of its stars, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, one of the meatiest roles of their respective careers. As Colette, Knightley grows before your eyes as she evolves rapidly from sheltered country girl (she was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur, Burgundy) to fearless denizen of the salons, boudoirs and stages of Belle Époque Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Stanley Kubrick’s use of music in his films has been inspirational. In 1999, The Caretaker – a nom-de-musique of Jim Kirby – issued Selected Memories From the Haunted Ballroom. While his alter-ego openly acknowledged the director’s film The Shining, the album’s music reconfigured vintage recordings of bands in tribute to the film’s haunted ballroom scenes.Kubrick has affected how music is heard. Until 1972, “Singin' in the Rain” was inseparable from the 1952 film of the same name. A song of joy, it exulted the shared belief that obstacles were there to be overcome. However, with the release Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.But what otherwise Read more ...