mon 04/11/2024

Film reviews, news & interviews

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

Saskia Baron

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. 

Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter London

Graham Fuller

Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.

Small Things Like These review - less is more in...

Demetrios Matheou

There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed...

The Room Next Door review - Almodóvar out of his...

Hugh Barnes

Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a...

Blu-ray: The Outcasts

Nick Hasted

This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more...

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

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

Dahomey review - return of the king

Nick Hasted

Looted artefacts' repatriation gains soulful Afrofuturist resonance in Mati Diop's doc

Milisuthando review - exorcising apartheid

Nick Hasted

Poetic consideration of a complex girlhood in white South Africa's black 'homelands'

theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema

Harry Thorfinn-George

In time for Halloween, the author discusses 'Feeding the Monster' - and why she thinks horror cinema has entered a new phase

Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early Works

Nick Hasted

British film magician's apprenticeship revealed

Since Yesterday review - championing a neglected female music scene

India Lewis

A chronological journey through the unjustly underrated world of Scotland's women bands

The Wild Robot - beasts and bot bond, gradually

Pamela Jahn

DreamWorks' latest kids' adventure suggests that cosying up to AI is a fait accompli

Smile 2 review - worthy follow up to runaway hit

Harry Thorfinn-George

True to its gleefully unsubtle predecessor but with a real sense of dread this time

London Film Festival 2024 - Daniel Craig, Amy Adams, Twiggy, Christopher Reeve and some snails

Adam Sweeting

All of cinematic life is here

The Apprentice review - from chump to Trump

James Saynor

A blistering study of The Donald’s bad education

The Crime Is Mine review - entertaining froth from a crack cast

Helen Hawkins

François Ozon keeps the mood light in a quasi-feminist period piece

Woman of the Hour, Netflix review - gripping drama follows a true-life Seventies serial killer

Markie Robson-Scott

Anna Kendrick's powerful directorial debut focuses on Rodney Alcala's victims and the ones who got away

Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assisted

Hugh Barnes

Doc about Shackleton's ill-fated expedition and the search for his ship sinks into bathos

Blu-ray: The Valley of the Bees

Graham Rickson

František Vláčil’s taut, intense medieval thriller is a classic of Czech cinema

Salem’s Lot review - listless King remake

Nick Hasted

King's small-town vampires suffer vicious edits amidst tantalising folk magic

London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmare

Adam Sweeting

Another cinematic feast as LFF '24 gets underway

The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty traditional divers

Sarah Kent

Eye-opening Korean doc about intrepid harvesters of the deep

Timestalker review – she's lost control again

Hugh Barnes

Alice Lowe directs herself as a woman pursuing the wrong dude, century after century

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

Close Footnote

The future of Arts Journalism

Can you help give theartsdesk.com a future? We’re a small, sturdy part of the British cultural eco-system. But we urgently need financing to survive. Without this, we’ll close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

If you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

latest in Today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Fauré Centenary Concert 1, Wigmore Hall review - Isserlis an...

Earlier this year, Steven Isserlis curated a revelatory Sheffield Chamber Music Festival spotlighting Saint-Saëns, with...

Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings review - a gift that keeps o...

In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William...

Ohlsson, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manc...

The BBC Philharmonic were right to bill Garrick Ohlsson, soloist in ...

Album: Møster! - Springs

Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with...

Music Reissues Weekly: Isaac Hayes - Hot Buttered Singles

After the chart success of his second album, June 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul, it was inevitable that any single had to represent Isaac...

Guards at the Taj, Orange Tree Theatre review - miniature ma...

It’s 1648 in Agra, and an excitable young guardsman has come up with an idea: a giant flying platform that he calls an “aeroplat”. As...

Legacy, Linbury Theatre review - an exceptional display of b...

In the foyer of the Linbury Theatre is an exhibition which gives a very upbeat account of the presence of...

'His ideal worlds embraced me with their light and love...

"I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness......

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

Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean...

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters