Film
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 ...
Sarah Kent
How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.In How to... Devas takes the next step. Focusing on three key questions – How to value nature? 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 ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a big ask of an audience to watch a film which for most of its two hour running time, focuses on just two actors, even when they are doing their best work. It’s impossible to fault Woody Norman, the young British actor who first attracted praise on C’mon C’mon. Here he is playing 13-year-old Roy, a sensitive London schoolboy with a mop of unruly dark curls and expressive dark eyes. His parents’ relationship is long over when he takes up his estranged French father’s invitation to live for a year on an uninhabited island in the Norwegian fjords. There’s nothing like Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Calcutta plays an important supporting role in Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (Mahanagar), though we only catch glimpses of it until the film’s final seconds. Ray’s opening sequence follows Anil Chatterjee’s Subrata on his daily commute, the camera fixed on the tram’s sparking trolley pole rather than the bustling streets below. It’s disconcerting but obliquely reminds us that The Big City is at heart an intense and claustrophobic domestic drama, much of the action taking place in the apartment which Subrata shares with his wife, son, sister-in-law and elderly parents. The living conditions are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Modesty is the last refuge of fantasy franchises once too big to fail. Much like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Captain America: Brave New World, Supergirl is a scaled-back sf story with minor-league villains and a manageable quest. Two films into James Gunn’s DC Extended Universe reboot, it already feels like a fill-in.It’s still a long way from last orders in the pub crawl glimpsed when Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Milly Alcock) cameoed in Superman as she continues her interstellar 23rd birthday party. The cousin of Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet) is more like his surly kid sister, exasperated Read more ...
Saskia Baron
If screwball noir is a subgenre (encompassing Something Wild, Fargo, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Wild at Heart, After Hours), then Anders Thomas Jensen is its Danish proponent. The Last Viking is a highwire act in which throwaway comic barbs delivered at a clip are interrupted by brutal violence, ostensibly with the aim of keeping the audience ricocheting between laughs and gasps. Whether it works here is another question, but it looks like the cast, most of whom have worked with Jensen before and will be familiar to fans of Scandinavian cinema, were having a very Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with their Hungarian parents. The kids trampoline, visit a wildlife preserve with their mother, walk on the beach, make paper boats and sail them in the kitchen sink. Dappled sunlight is filtered through trees. There’s a feeling of boredom and of time passing slowly. Their father (Adam Tompa) silently films everything on his video camera.Jeremy (an impressive Erik Beddoes, pictured below), a teenager, is several years older than the other three and a lanky, Read more ...
James Saynor
Nineteen-ninety-five was the dawn of the internet for most people, and the same year saw the release of the first Toy Story movie. Yet cyberspace and “tech” has rarely intruded into the frantic playroom of the Toy Story characters. Toy Story 3 (2010) was at one stage due to have them searching for one of their kin on the web until that script was ditched. (It was a brief time when the franchise was taken away from Pixar, the legendary outfit that pioneered cartoons done by computer chip.)Today, though, our zombieland of bleary eyes and stressed scrolling on small screens can no longer be Read more ...
johncarvill
Fans of classic Hollywood movies are liable to suffer a stab of frustration these days, when polls or vox pops canvas people’s favourite films. Selections seem to skew towards the worthy; there’s a performative whiff to a lot of it. Those Criterion Closet Pick videos are a case in point: “Pixie Buttermore, breakout star of Slithering Zombies 4, selects Woman in the Dunes”. God forbid somebody should pick something from the Golden Age.In this context, Some Like it Hot – now playing nationally as part of the celebrations around Marilyn Monroe’s centenary – stands out in the top 50 of Read more ...