wed 04/12/2024

Film reviews, news & interviews

Blu-ray: Juggernaut

Graham Rickson

That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.

Blu-ray: Black Tuesday

Graham Fuller

The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major film noir and...

Conclave review - secrets and lies in the Vatican...

Adam Sweeting

“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t finding...

All We Imagine as Light review - tender portrait...

Helen Hawkins

The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows...

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Witches review - beyond the broomstick, the cat, and the pointy hat

Justine Elias

A documentary probes the links between stigmatised women and postpartum depression

Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger

Matt Wolf

Musical theatre behemoth becomes an outsized film - and this is just part one

Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director's swansong

Sarah Kent

Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden bows out with a confusing tale of a beautiful predator

Mediha review - a brutalised Yazidi teen comes of age with a camera

Saskia Baron

A documentary frames the video diary of a Yazidi girl who suffered horrific abuse

Blu-ray: Pharaoh

Graham Rickson

Dazzling historical epic from the Polish New Wave

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat review - jazz-themed documentary on the 1960s Congo Crisis

Sebastian Scotney

Musicians played different roles in the struggles of the newly independent African country

Gladiator II review - can lightning strike twice?

Adam Sweeting

Sir Ridley Scott makes a big, bold return to the Roman Empire

ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetime

Sarah Kent

Despite anticipating disaster, this mesmerising voyage is full of hope

Joy review - the birth pangs of in vitro fertilisation

Justine Elias

Subtle drama about the quest to give women a childbearing choice

Blu-ray: The Oblong Box

Nick Hasted

Vincent Price and Christopher Lee in 'Witchfinder General''s phantom follow-up

Bird review - travails of an unseen English tween

Graham Fuller

Andrea Arnold gives a hyperreal spin to her latest story of a neglected girl

The Problem With People review - local zero

Hugh Barnes

Hardly a Forsyth saga, this unfunny Oirish comedy is a homage to catatonia

Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex worker

Saskia Baron

Sean Baker's bracing Palme d'Or winner twists, turns, and makes a star of Mikey Madison

Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter London

Graham Fuller

Steve McQueen's overwought World War Two boy's adventure film delivers its message

Small Things Like These review - less is more in stirring Irish drama

Demetrios Matheou

Cillian Murphy is exceptional as a man wrestling with his church and conscience

The Room Next Door review - Almodóvar out of his comfort zone

Hugh Barnes

The Spanish director's meditation on mortality is a beautiful misfire

Blu-ray: The Outcasts

Nick Hasted

A forgotten Irish folk horror is eerily magical and earthed in the soil

London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and Ukraine

Nick Hasted

Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winner adapted, a Belgian serial killer, Chinese odyssey and sexist Indian police in our final round-up

London Film Festival 2024 - a shaman and sham

Nick Hasted

Warren Ellis saves wildlife and himself, Pavement go post-modern in two music docs

Documentary highlights from the 2024 London Film Festival

Saskia Baron

A close look at insightful new non-fiction films about single motherhood, visionary photographers, scam artists, legacies of colonialism, and more

Venom: The Last Dance review - Tom Hardy's people-eater bows out

Nick Hasted

Poignancy studs the digital punch-ups as the super-alien saga concludes

theartsdesk Q&A: director Jacques Audiard on his Mexican trans gangster musical 'Emilia Pérez'

Pamela Jahn

The French filmmaker concocted an extravagant genre mash-up to confront the tragedy of Mexico's 'disappeared'

London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria Callas

Adam Sweeting

Plus John & Yoko in New York, Elton in LA and Pauline Black in Coventry

Emilia Perez review - Audiard's beguiling musical tribute to Mexico's women

Helen Hawkins

Exceptional female cast gives this 'comedy' a serious, angry core

Footnote: a brief history of British film

England was movie-mad long before the US. Contrary to appearances in a Hollywood-dominated world, the celluloid film process was patented in London in 1890 and by 1905 minute-long films of news and horse-racing were being made and shown widely in purpose-built cinemas, with added sound. The race to set up a film industry, though, was swiftly won by the entrepreneurial Americans, attracting eager new UK talents like Charlie Chaplin. However, it was a British film that in 1925 was the world's first in-flight movie, and soon the arrival of young suspense genius Alfred Hitchcock and a new legal requirement for a "quota" of British film in cinemas assisted a golden age for UK film. Under the leadership of Alexander Korda's London Films, Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) is considered the first true sound movie, documentary techniques developed and the first Technicolor movies were made.

Brief_EncounterWhen war intervened, British filmmakers turned effectively to lean, effective propaganda documentaries and heroic, studio-based war-films. After Hitchcock too left for Hollywood, David Lean launched into an epic career with Brief Encounter (pictured), Powell and Pressburger took up the fantasy mantle with The Red Shoes, while Carol Reed created Anglo films noirs such as The Third Man. Fifties tastes were more domestic, with Ealing comedies succeeded by Hammer horror and Carry-Ons; and more challenging in the Sixties, with New Wave films about sex and class by Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey and Tony Richardson. But it was Sixties British escapism which finally went global: the Bond films, Lean's Dr Zhivago, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Sean Connery, Julie Christie and Julie Andrews Hollywood's top stars.

In the 1970s, recession and the TV boom undermined cinema-going and censorship changes brought controversy: a British porn boom and scandals over The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. While Hollywood fielded Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese epics, Britain riposted with The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, but 1980s recession dealt a sharp blow to British cinema, and the Rank Organisation closed, after more than half a century. However more recently social comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Full Monty, and royal dramas such as The Queen and The King's Speech have enhanced British reputation for wit, social observation and character acting.

As more films are globally co-produced, the success of British individual talents has come to outweigh the modest showing of the industry itself. Every week The Arts Desk reviews latest releases as well as leading international film festivals, and features in-depth career interviews with leading stars. Its writers include Jasper Rees, Graham Fuller, Anne Billson, Nick Hasted, Alexandra Coghlan, Veronica Lee, Emma Simmonds, Adam Sweeting and Matt Wolf

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