film directors
Helen Hawkins
Filmed ballets involve a different way of watching: you may know a piece well, but you aren’t used to staring into its lead dancers’ eyes as they perform their roles. Not all dancers give good close-up, either. But a new film by the Oscar-winning director Asif Kapadia of Akram Khan’s Creature, made for English National Ballet in 2021, has transformed the original live version into a moving drama.Creature still isn’t an easy watch. It’s set in a vast murky room with high ceilings and wooden planks for walls. Outside, when the side doors occasionally open, there is blindingly white light and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).There are no comedies here – late mid-life brought out the full darkness of the Swedish director’s palette – although Fanny and Alexander both delights and shocks as it combines a characteristic lightness of touch, including a much-loved farting uncle and a child’s eye view of adult rituals, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin and Nope are marvellously mad in their own ways.The Quiet Girl, Playground and Petite Maman, all films of great beauty, are focused on the difficulties of growing up, as, in a more extreme way, is Nitram, the story of a mass-shooter whose parents are powerless in the face of their deeply disturbed son. And The Wonder, a strange, beautifully lit story Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made their home region of Liège the site of excruciating moral crises and crushing injustice. Their 12 masterful, double Palme d'Or-winning films act as parables for the embattled human soul.The latest, Tori and Lokita, sees two paperless child migrants, 12-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and 16-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu), form a familial bond in the face of ruthless criminals and oppressive bureaucracy. There is furious energy as Tori pumps his bike down neon city streets on a drugs run, and stygian despair when Lokita is walled away in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Two-percent movie-making and 98% hustling,” Orson Welles sighed not long before his death in 1985. “It’s no way to spend a life.” His 1962 film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his penultimate full-scale completed feature, only 1965’s Chimes at Midnight similarly allowing him a regular director’s resources during his last quarter-century (the fraudulent documentary F for Fake from 1973 was later conjured from scraps with filmic legerdemain).Kafka’s paranoid tale, written as World War One began, and predictive of the totalitarian mindset which would murder his own family in the Holocaust, sees Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Vesper is a piece of arty European sci-fi, filmed in the forests of Lithuania (homeland of co-director Kristina Buozyte) and set in a dystopian future conjured up by its French co-director Bruno Samper (a "digital experience designer"). The two collaborated in 2012 on Vanishing Waves, which was the first Lithuanian sci-fi film to play in the US, won awards on the festival circuit, and came with quite a lot of explicit erotica.Ten years on, the directing duo have been working with a predominantly British cast to create an English-language film likely to appeal mostly to younger Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.The little stub of plot around which McDonagh has built his narrative is bafflingly simple. It’s 1923. Colm and Pádraic live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin. They’re long-standing friends, and every evening they go to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Santiago materialises through white clouds like a secret city, concealed by the elements. In this conclusion to Patricio Guzmán’s trilogy documenting the long nightmare of Chile’s coup through its landscape, the Cordillera – the country’s Andes spine – is an impassive, monumental witness to the Pinochet regime’s buried acts, and victims’ graveyard. The land, Guzmán suspects, can remember.Guzmán endured mock executions then entered exile after Pinochet’s fatal, CIA-backed 1973 ousting of left-wing President Allende. In The Cordillera of Dreams and its predecessors, the boy lover of science- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Antonioni was a poet of enervated alienation, sold, like early Godard, by profoundly beautiful actors, and perfected in the sun-bleached lassitude of Monica Vitti’s search for her missing friend in L’Avventura (1960).He wandered the world after 1964, applying his hip imprimatur to cultures in flux, from a fantastic, sexy, paranoid Swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) to Communist China in Chung Kio, Cina (1972), and drew Jack Nicholson into his games of existential ennui in The Passenger (1975). Returning to Italy for one last Vitti film, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980), which he dismissed, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm.It's 1933, and Bert (Christian Bale) is a Catholic-Jewish doctor with a glass eye helping fellow traumatised Great War veterans in New York. His veteran best friend, lawyer Harold (John David Washington), asks him to autopsy their beloved commanding officer, whose daughter (Taylor Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career.Sangok is a former film actress who has returned from the US to Seoul to stay with her sister Jeongok (Cho Yunhee, pictured below right with Lee). Though secretly carrying a heavy Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paris, 16 March 1960 – and cinema ruptured. The first public screening of the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, A Bout de Souffle, breathed life into an arthritic medium, announcing a new world of possibility.Its story, of a French petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who kills a cop and goes on the run with his pretty young lover (Jean Seberg), was deliberately drawn from the Hollywood films Godard and his fellow critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had consumed with monastic devotion in post-war cinématèques. But its execution liberated.In its first few minutes, the smooth, Read more ...