Film
Pamela Jahn
Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab caused an international outcry at last year's Venice film festival – a fact that the Oscar-nominated Tunisian director prefers to play down. "I'm a director. I don't usually like to talk about my films," she said. But this time was different. There was an unusually heavy burden of responsibility.Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, the film was inspired by tragic real events. On 29 January 2024, Palestinian Red Crescent staff received an emergency call from Gaza. A five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab was trapped in her aunt and uncle's car, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Juraj Herz’s acclaimed dark comedy The Cremator proved too much for post-1968 censors, the film withdrawn from circulation in 1973 and banned until 1990. While several prominent Czech directors left the country after Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague, Herz stayed put, shrewdly realising that making "genre" films allowed him to tackle challenging subjects without much state interference. Released in 1971 and adapted from a novel by Jaroslav Havlícek, Oil Lamps opens in a cosy theatre on the very cusp of the 20th century, one affluent audience member confidently predicting that the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last GP in Britain tries to heal his Rage virus-ravaged country in this sequel not only to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later but his Olympics NHS tribute. Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is civilisation’s softly spoken but ferociously principled keeper, stoking its embers even in the monstrous Infected, while confronting evil people visually and morally modelled on Jimmy Savile. We begin with 28 Years Later's flawed Scottish island redoubt behind us and only its boy Spike (Alfie Williams) going on. He’s now in the clutches of fake Satanist messiah Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Brendan Fraser’s mournful, basset-hound face finds a loving home in this affecting fable from director/writer Hikari. Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor struggling to make a niche for himself in Tokyo. He’s the definitive stranger in a strange land – though at least he can speak Japanese – and parts are few and far between (a career highlight was his flying superhero who advertises toothpaste). A solitary Phillip can often be found drowning his sorrows in local bars.But all is not quite lost. Phillip gets an offer he can’t afford to refuse when he’s approached by Rental Read more ...
Sarah Kent
State of Statelessness is the brainchild of the Drung Tibetan Filmmakers’ Collective based in Dharamshala, home to the Dalai Lama and spiritual heart of the Tibetan community in exile. Four short films, each by a different director, address what it means to live in the diaspora without a homeland. And like a short story, each film offers a glimpse into lives spent in perpetual exile.The quartet begins and ends with water. An aerial shot of a ferry crossing the Mekong delta introduces Where the River Ends directed by Tsering Tashi Gyalthang. Waiting for the ferry are Tenzin and his young Read more ...
James Saynor
We might simply call it a dilemma, but Hollywood screenwriters call it a “crisis decision”, or maybe sometimes a “swivel”. It’s when there’s an impossible choice, in movies sublime or ridiculous, whether it’s Rick choosing between Ilsa and beating the Nazis in Casablanca, or – in the latter category – pointless superheroes choosing between a baby and the entire globe in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.Yet the crisis decision to end them all occurs a long way from Hollywood in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a brisk, unbearably fraught dramatisation of an emblematic event in the Gaza war – when a six Read more ...
James Saynor
When Hamlet the Dane talked about “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, it was typical of the way that Shakespeare generalised. The writer didn’t let you infer too much about himself. So when he specified one or two of the thousand shocks in the same speech (“To be, or not to be”), they involved rather impersonal, evasive things like “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office”. In this, his most famous soliloquy, Shakespeare remained all things to everyone – his “universal” quality that made his literary name while eternally frustrating biographers.This new Shakespeare Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“So then I go and I make another cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with raspberry jelly and now I’m going to call Allen Ginsberg at exactly noon. Because he does his meditations and they told me to call him either at 11 at night or after 12.”On 18 December 1974, Peter Hujar photographed Ginsberg for The New York Times, his first commission from the paper. The meeting with Ginsberg – it’s a tough assignment, Ginsberg never warms up and when Hujar develops the film he says there was “no contact there” – is just one part of the day that he describes in minute detail on 19 December to his Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is joy, energy – and no little irony – about the way that Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play and sing the parts of a working-class couple from Milwaukee with big dreams and big hair.Song Sung Blue tells the story of a real-life couple, Mike Sardina (1951-2006) and Claire Stengl/Sardina, who formed a Neil Diamond tribute band in the early 1990s and performed in small venues, becoming local celebrities under the name Lightning and Thunder.The plot is about the pair’s desire to fulfill themselves musically. It’s an aspiration that constantly jolts them – and the viewer – Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Actors who play someone with Tourette syndrome have to take a huge step out of their comfort zone. Robert Aramayo accepted that challenge when he was cast as John Davidson in I Swear. On 30 November, Aramayo's portrayal of Davidson was named 2025's Best Lead performance at the British Independent Film Awards.Davidson is a colourful character, to say the least. Warm and caring, he's also unpredictable, outspoken, and prone to swearing wherever he is. It is one of the most marked characteristics of the condition he's been living with for decades. His Tourette's activism led to Queen Elizabeth Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1952 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, seven years after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the Japanese empire, but one skinny New Yorker is still waging war against it, armed with street savvy, a motormouth and a traditional table tennis paddle.This is the unlikely subject of Josh Safdie’s first solo directing release, Marty Supreme, loosely based on elements from the life of Marty Reisman (here called Mauser and played by Timothée Chalamet). Most Japanese sportspeople had to observe a post-war travel ban, but not the low-level celebrities of the table tennis world, which was barely Read more ...