Film
Helen Hawkins
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s film was a surprise hit at Cannes last year, winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. It’s a ghost story that wears its genre trappings lightly, because it isn’t a regular ghost story at all. None of the usual shock tactics are deployed; instead, an offbeat whimsical humour guides the narrative, to an unlikely destination.Boonbunchachoke sets us up in the opening sequence with a key theme: how to handle the past. We see a beautiful sculpted frieze in pale stone taking shape, based on a tableau of people from different walks of life – a soldier, a teacher, a Read more ...
Graham Rickson
“Your civilisation is young but controlled by minds which are old,” says one of the alien Alphoids in Toomorrow to the four young musicians beamed aboard his spacecraft. He’s also hinting at one of the film’s problems; Toomorrow often feels like it’s been helmed by a creative team rather creakier than the young target audience, one contemporary review describing it as "a film for youngsters made by oldsters who are attempting to commercialise everything that’s dear to the teenage heart". That parts of it it resemble an extended episode of The Monkees is unsurprising, given that one of the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.Why did this woman in her late seventies decide to sue, 30 years after the assault? The documentary goes a long way towards answering that question, though essentially the answer is that Trump repeatedly defamed her after she made allegations of rape against him in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow. The honourable intent is to savage gun laws and the attention Read more ...
Graham Rickson
The completion of the Berlin Wall in 1961 severely damaged the East German industrial economy, the fallout soon affecting the GDR’s film industry. December 1965 saw the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the East German Socialist Unity Party. Nominally a forum where the country’s economic future could be discussed and planned, the gathering also addressed perceived deficiencies in the GDR’s cultural output. Books, plays and music were attacked, and 11 films made by the state production house DEFA, some still under production, were taken out of circulation. One of these was Frank Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The man who made Interstellar, Tenet and Oppenheimer can hardly be accused of not thinking big. Now, with The Odyssey, he’s thinking epic. Clocking in at a whisker under three hours and peppered with bankable stars, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s imperishable poem is a bold attempt to recreate the ancient world of the 12th Century BC, with its gods, monsters and all. And it's the first feature film to be shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras. Many early reviews have been ecstatic, hailing Nolan’s $250m-worth of movie for its thrillingness, boldness, majesticness and so forth, but Read more ...
Justine Elias.
The first word of The Iliad is “war”; the first word of The Odyssey is “man”. After that, the twists and turns of Homer’s epic poems veer in wildly different directions. It’s fitting, then, that cinematic adaptations are multi-faceted, too. From the dawn of the medium, Homer’s works have proved to be irresistible to adapters, who have given us everything from a four-minute silent fever dream of sex and horror to a seven-hour Italian miniseries that leaves nothing out, except the Greek language. Here are some of the notable efforts:
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Helen Hawkins
The regular scriptwriter for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, Efthimis Filippou, has worked with another director, Karim Aïnouz, on Rosebush Pruning. It’s a film that bills itself as “inspired by” Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 satire, Fists in the Pocket, but deals in the same kind of lurid surrealism as Lanthimos’s off-kilter yarns.This is a narrative that’s by turns enigmatic and unsubtle. Bellocchio’s starting point is there – the son of a large, dysfunctional family, in which one child is epileptic and one parent blind, sets about downsizing it – but in Filippou’s hands it’s become a cluttered story Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A recent OFCOM study found that over 90% of young people tune into video-sharing platform and streamers and only spend a quarter of their viewing time on broadcast TV. It’s a fair guess then that the majority of the content they are watching has been generated on smartphones, which makes the SMart festival particularly timely. A one-day celebration that ranges from no-budget DIY shorts to acclaimed features like Sean Baker’s Tangerine and Shin-Ching Tsou’s A Left-Handed Girl, it’s a clear demonstration that filmmakers are embracing bargain technology to create a new generation of Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Playwright and novelist Rodolfo Usigli wasn’t impressed with Luis Buñuel’s 1955 film version of his novel Ensayo de un crimen, unhappy with the changes made by the director and his co-screenwriter Eduardo Ugarte. Especially the introduction of some nuns “who die in a tragic and entirely gratuitous way. There is a good Buñuel and a bad Buñuel. And I got the bad Buñuel.” The fourteenth of the 21 films which Buñuel directed between 1947 and 1962 in Mexico, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Buñuel’s own English title) is a disquieting mixture of black comedy and psychological Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Two couples meet up for an apparently convivial meal, except that there’s a minefield under their feet. And when they trigger an explosion, one of the couples will be left trying to pick up the pieces. Oddly, this isn’t a synopsis of Kristoffer Borgli’s recent The Drama, though it could be. It’s for the latest project from the actor-director Olivia Wilde, The Invite. In both films, middle-class urbanites have their lives upended and are threatened with being left that way. Wilde’s film is a chamber piece, beginning with the sounds of two people trying to play a piano duet, then Read more ...
James Saynor
For factual footage from battle zones, we once used to rely on people toting heavy cameras who went in and out of the fields of war. The successors to news camera legends like Mohamed Amin and Rory Peck are still with us, but the most immersive, longitudinal studies are now in the hands of citizen journalists with iPhones and Sony Alphas. They patch together Oscar-winning gonzo docs from terabytes of footage kept under the bed.The tortuous civil war in Syria has produced a gaggle of such movies, and Birds of War is the conflict’s latest big-screen eye-catcher. It tracks a love story leading Read more ...