Film
Helen Hawkins
Director Louise Courvoisier has put herself firmly on the film map with this story of young Totone and his little sister, carving out a living in the modern-day Jura countryside after being orphaned. Think the Dardenne brothers with more sunshine and less angst, a way of life where young calves are transported to market in the front seat of the family car.Courvoisier is from the village featured and cast her film from the locals working there. All are amateurs, all are naturals. Her Totone is a poultry farm worker, Clément Faveau, an 18-year-old with the ruddy cheeks and telltale half- Read more ...
John Carvill
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been charged with – let alone convicted of – any crime, Allen in 2025 is, to all intents and purposes, cancelled.So let’s deal with that first. The reason for Allen having suffered what McGilligan calls “the living death of being declared an unperson” has transmogrified over the years. Initially, he was weighed in the balance of public opinion and found Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between the evils”. Toshiro Mifune’s nameless rōnin pitches up a run-down village purely by chance, tossing a stick in the air at a fork in the road to choose which direction to take.Though taking place in mid-19th century Japan, the sets reflect Kurosawa’s love of classic westerns, the scruffy buildings facing onto a dusty main street. The presence of a dog carrying a severed hand is a bad omen, a dispute over Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he changed his name. This film directed by Marc Evans explains how it came about.PH Burton (played by Toby Jones) was the teenage Richard’s English teacher in Port Talbot, a wannabe playwright who, on the brink of fame when the war broke out, was deployed as a teacher instead. His tutelage turned the raw material that was Richard (Harry Lawtey) into the 1950s stage star with the burnished voice. The name change was suggested by an RAF friend of PH’s who was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s feature debut Restless, it’s visited on middle-aged nurse Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) by thirtyish Deano (Aston McAuley), the superficially affable toxic male who moves in next door with two mates and holds raves in their living room, “all night and every night”.A single mother whose son has just left for university, Nicky is pressed by her boss to work extra shifts at the understaffed care home for the elderly that employs her. In her downtime, she does yoga, watches snooker on TV, listens to classical music, and bakes cakes for herself. Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke and can only communicate through an iPad. The stairlift is in constant use, as is her bell. And there are jokes about pouffes.Set in suburban Dublin, it’s warm-hearted and charming in a lukewarm way, but although it’s based on Darren Thornton and his co-writer brother Colin’s experiences with their own mother, who had a degenerative disease, it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” The Aesop-ian maxim roughly applies to Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) in Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia. Though unemployed Toulouse baker Jérémie doesn’t acquire the business that was run by his deceased mentor Jean-Pierre, the film’s ambiguous ending suggests he might still share it with the widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Unless or until the gendarmes come calling.Jérémie is first seen driving to Martine and Jean-Pierre’s village in rural Occitania – where he was raised and trained – in a protracted scene rendered eerily oppressive by the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.The End is a dystopian musical about a rich family that found refuge in a bunker 20 years after an environmental catastrophe. The parents (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon), their grownup son (George Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”Coralie Fargeat, writer, editor, producer and director of The Substance, is discussing the “visceral journey” and extraordinary make-up effects in her body-horror genre movie, which won an Oscar for best make-up and hairstyling. It was also nominated in several other categories, and Demi Moore, as ageing Jane Fonda-esque TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle, won a Golden Globe award for best actress.A featurette, The Making of the Substance, is one of the extras in this MUBI Read more ...
Justine Elias
The typical Jason Statham movie character – muscular, resourceful, drily humorous – could probably carve an army into mincemeat using a few odds and ends nicked from the local Hobbycraft. In A Working Man, Statham’s second collaboration with writer-director David Ayer (The Beekeeper), the star defends the helpless with pickaxes and sledgehammers. And then he gets really violent.This time, Statham (Killer Elite, Ocean’s Eleven) portrays Levon (rhymes with “heaven”) Cade, an ex-SAS operator making a meagre living as a construction manager. Though the film’s graphic-novelish opening credits ( Read more ...
India Lewis
The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily beautiful salt mine are a mother (Tilda Swinton), father (Michael Shannon), son (George MacKay), their doctor (Lennie James), butler (Tim McInnerny), and friend (Bronagh Gallagher).The inhabitants of the mine are themselves preserved in salt, a sort of hermetic stasis that forbids the incursion of the outside world. The mother’s hair remains artificially Read more ...