Film
Saskia Baron
La Cocina is one of those films that cuts an excellent trailer, succinctly delivering just enough characters, plot and visual flair to entice an audience that enjoyed recent dramas set in restaurant kitchens like The Bear, Boiling Point and The Menu.But if the trailer is a tightly-edited taster that whets the appetite, the film itself shows little evidence of the director’s ability to exercise similar restraint in the cutting room. At 139 minutes, La Cocina somewhat outstays its welcome, particularly with a series of false endings. To overcook this metaphor, it’s like going to a restaurant Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.Based on British Beat writer Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, Lifeforce (1985) is indeed one of its decade’s most unhinged, far out films. Infamous and too easily dismissed for 18-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May’s mostly nude queen Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, Saltburn or Six Degrees of Separation. A clever young man with low social status infiltrates a far more privileged family, with devastating results. The difference here is that it's set not among American or European elites but in the booming economy of China with its high-tech citadels and international aspirations. The Tu family live in a luxurious apartment in an unnamed city; they want their only son, Wei (Muran Lin), to go to an Ivy League university but he’s more interested in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is a documentary portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed for his pioneering use of colour in the 1960s when only black and white images were taken seriously as an art form. My European Trip: Photographs from the Car, his debut show at MOMA in 1968 was a breakthrough. Hugely successful gallery shows around the world and countless books have followed. Meyerowitz has never lacked for acclaim and the opportunities that it can bring. When the World Trade Centre was attacked in 2001, he was the only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though perhaps asking Robert De Niro to play both of them was a trifle over-optimistic. With his track record of crime-dynasty epics including The Godfather Part II, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas and Casino, De Niro is able to inhabit the gangster milieu merely by slipping on a favourite overcoat and homburg hat, but watching him play both Genovese and Costello here creates a sort of visual dyslexia.While his Costello feels like a fully-rounded Read more ...
Nick Hasted
François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).Sexuality, gender and love itself prove variously slippery in The New Girlfriend (2014) and the violently different twins of L’Amant double (2017), while feminist equality powers Potiche (2010), the provincial Seventies comedy of umbrella factory strikes and elections with a sparring Depardieu and Deneuve. Ozon’s comfort Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction. She is Santosh (Shahana Goswami), wife of a handsome young policeman in a state that is apparently a disguised Utter Pradesh, where the film was shot. Hers is a “love marriage”, and her grief when her husband is killed on duty at an anti-police riot is palpable. As she Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.In addition, the story that Gints Zibalodis Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. Talking over Zoom from her home near Epping Forest, Apte, 38, quickly stresses that it wasn’t the film's topic of arranged marriage that made her sign up for Kandhari’s feature debut. What she loved about his script, she says, “is the wild and weirdly wonderful way it tackles the feeling of not fitting in, and the eventual journey of accepting oneself as one is with all the imperfections.”Apte’s Uma Read more ...
John Carvill
Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”There’s no discernible attempt on Rose's part to map her characters onto Tolstoy’s, but if we were to identify a potential analogue for Konstantin Levin, the moral centre of Anna Karenina, it would be Graham (Josh Radnor). A decent, introspective, socially awkward would-be actor and screenwriter, Graham inhabits the upper floor of his childhood home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a much more sly and streamlined operation. Written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones etc) and directed by Steven Soderbergh, Black Bag keeps a tight focus on a small group of operatives from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.Superficially they might appear to be friends, and the film’s opening set piece finds them attending a dinner party hosted by George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (a glamorous and regal Cate Blanchett, pictured Read more ...