Film
Nick Hasted
Immaturity is a virtue in Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy, a slapstick class satire set in an exclusive New York apartment block where being on the list gains a hellish new meaning. Derivative, fright-free and frenetically stylised, it still partially confirms the promise of the director’s 2018 debut Why Don’t You Just Die!Sokolov introduced Tarantino’s school of blackly comic ultra-violence to Putin’s Russia and this is his first feature in exile since criticising the Ukraine war, filmed in Latvia as part of producer Artem Vasilyev’s push to bring East European talent to the West. Its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The vertigo of lawlessness in Stalin’s Russia carries contemporary resonance in Sergei Loznitsa’s latest Soviet parable. As a Russian dictator invades a neighbour and erases his enemies and the US Supreme Court presides over an authoritarian rampage, paranoid purges and show trials no longer seem distant.Two Prosecutors is based on gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov’s novel, and set in 1937 during the Great Purge. We are in a provincial jail where starving old men burn letters petitioning Stalin for mercy. Fresh-faced local prosecutor Kornyev (Alexandr Kuznetsov) has somehow received a message Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
François Ozon’s film of Albert Camus's The Stranger, one of the most iconic works of French existential literature, is as well-paced and restrained as the minimalistic novella from which the director faithfully adapted it.Set in bustling 1940s Algiers, where escaping the fierce sunlight and oppressive heat is impossible, the movie was photographed by regular Ozon collaborator Manu Dacosse in gleaming black and white with dabs of chiaroscuro, but not to the extent that the atmospherics are fetishised.It becomes clear almost instantly how the story is going to end. It will be in the darker Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.Loznitsa describes it as a "typical Russian fairy tale", one that evolved as the bureaucratic nightmarishness evoked by Gogol, as well as Kafka, kept creeping into his Read more ...
johncarvill
It’s hard to describe this hot mess of a film without divulging the entire plot. And even if you did, you’d struggle to convey the scabrous psychosexual atmosphere, or summarise the thematic currents that swirl beneath the surface. As director Peter Medak says in one of the interviews on this typically well-stocked BFI disc, “It's too complicated to explain."The basic setup is simple, though: Theo (Peter McEnery, pictured below right) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) live above Theo’s father’s antiques shop in a down-at-heel corner of West London. They pass the time by indulging in what today Read more ...
graham.rickson
Strongroom is a film to be endured as much as enjoyed, Vernon Sewell’s low-budget thriller almost unbearable to watch in its final stages. Released in 1962 as a supporting feature, Strongroom depicts what happens when a bank heist goes badly wrong, leaving the branch manager and his secretary locked in a vault with just 12 hours of air. Unfolding over a long Easter weekend, the three gang members realise that if the bank staff suffocate, they’ll face a murder charge and capital punishment. Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn spend most of their screen time in perspiring in their cramped, Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia, certain to end his friendship with the Pope, and whether to pardon two prisoners who killed their partners. He is meanwhile haunted by the knowledge that his late wife, for whom he grieves, was unfaithful.Grazia (the word means "grace" and "pardon" in Italian) is the seventh Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Your term is about to end,” Italian president De Santis (Toni Servillo) is told, with implications which extend far past politics. Director Paolo Sorrentino is second only to old maestro Marco Bellocchio in his current fascination with Italian power, from The Young Pope (2016) to Berlusconi satire Loro (2018). His muse Servillo’s bunga-bunga act in the latter contrasted with his gnomic reserve as post-war Machiavelli Guilio Andreotti in Il Divo (2009) and now this fictional sphinx, lizard-still even as damped passions threaten to finally erupt. His last half-year as head of state may anyway Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Hail Mary pass is a desperate act of sporting faith when regular tactics fail, and the world’s end is faced here by constitutional optimists on both sides of the camera: The Martian novelist Andy Weir and its film’s writer Drew Goddard, Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord and Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, waking alone in a spaceship unreachable light years from home, beard and brain mangled as he remembers his suicide mission. Gosling’s cool charm, a blank slate which flips from Drive’s smooth killer to La La Land’s mild lover, here converts into raw film star fuel for Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tony Kiritsis (the excellent Bill Skarsgård; Nosferatu) is a nervy, paranoid oddball. Well, he would be. He has an appointment with a mortgage broker and in the long cardboard box that he’s carrying is a sawn-off shotgun.Gus Van Sant’s first feature film since Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) is itself something of an oddball project. Fraught and compelling, with Al Pacino as a very nasty businessman, it's based on the true story of a hostage crisis in Indianapolis in 1977 and is a tense, claustrophobic depiction of the little guy pitted against a corrupt banking system. Though Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There were scattered moments of genuine excitement during the 98th Academy Awards, which saw One Battle After Another emerge with six Oscars, best picture and director amongst them, followed by the 16-times-nominated Sinners with four, including Michael B Jordan as best actor, and Frankenstein with three. It was hard not to thrill, for instance, at Sinners' Autumn Durald Arkapaw making history as the first woman ever to win for cinematography, a milestone she registered by having all the women in the audience stand: "I don't get here without you guys," she told the crowd. Or to be moved Read more ...
James Saynor
Do we really care what Hitler liked to eat? Well, here’s a film that does, so I can reveal an answer. Typical meals might have included chick pea salad with marinated courgette, pea soup with mint, or “cabbage fantasy” with cheese béchamel, followed by “his beloved apricot cake”. Of course, as every quiz expert knows, the Führer – along with having one testicle – became at some point a committed vegetarian.We watch the above dishes being queasily consumed in The Tasters, a movie about women dragooned by the Nazis into sampling Hitler’s food to protect him from poison plots and paranoia. It Read more ...