Film
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was forced to lay low.Now he’s directing a short drama for a few university students in Seoul in a class taught by his niece, the reticent, charming Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), who’s asked him to help out, though she assumed he’d say no. The previous director has just left due to embarrassing circumstances – he dated three of his students separately, so they’ve Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Mel Gibson probably made Flight Risk with Netflix’s “90-minute movies” slot in mind (in fact he overshot – it lasts 91 minutes). It hits the spot of “escapist no-brainer action flick” by being lean, sharply-focused and amusingly preposterous, and Gibson keeps the pace brisk enough that you don’t have time to dwell on the really daft bits.Perhaps taking a cue from Three Men In a Boat, Flight Risk is Two Men and a Woman on a Plane. The latter is a battered old Cessna in which quite a few gadgets don’t seem to work properly. It’s flying deputy US Marshall Madolyn Harris (Michelle Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.Soderbergh’s elliptical editing proffers a gradual, jigsaw portrait in scenes of parental boozing, rival siblings and Rebecca’s legal laxity. Chloe is meanwhile Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s a moment, as we build to a climax in Brady Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), when a servant at a grand house unwittingly nudges a candle into the path of a dangling curtain pull. The tassel ignites, unseen by gathering dinner guests.Then something happens that’s rare in the annals of film. In fact, nothing happens. The drapery is not particularly flammable and, unseen by anyone in a lingering wide shot, burns itself quickly out. This dog-that-doesn’t-bark, tree-falls-in-a-forest moment is, it turns out, signature Corbet.He’s a maker of perplexingly non-flammable Read more ...
Justine Elias
Despite Rossini’s banger of an overture and a Looney Tunes cartoon starring Daffy Duck as William Tell, I’ll wager that few non-German-speakers can recite the precise details of the Swiss folk hero’s legend. Beyond, that is, describing him as a Robin Hood of the Alps whose crossbow arrow pierced the apple perched on his son’s head. However, in a stirring new action-adventure movie Tell turns out to be a surprising protagonist. Writer-director Nick Hamm based William Tell on Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, itself the source of Rossini’s opera. After a sluggish opening, in which Tell ( Read more ...
John Carvill
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.The film opens with Nicky (Cassavetes) holed up in a flophouse hotel, itching with paranoia and convinced his mob bosses have a hit out on him. He calls his fellow gangster and lifelong best friend Mikey (Falk), but then refuses to open the hotel room door and let him in. It’s a metaphor for the whole story, the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years preceding his death this week show the loneliness of his vision in his medium’s conformist capital, which he nevertheless adored. “It’s kind of a trick in the light [that] is magical,” he said of his adopted hometown’s allure. “It gives you the indication that anything is possible. It’s critical for me to feel that light.”Mulholland Drive’s opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to the world under the alias of “Bob Dylan”.He was played by six different actors in Todd Haynes’s aptly named I’m Not There, and appeared as Jack Fate in the equally apposite Masked and Anonymous. He’s like TS Eliot’s Macavity, the Mystery Cat – “it’s useless to investigate – Macavity’s not there!”However, Dylan has been closely involved with James Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the angelic breathing of three young sisters sharing a bed in the snowy Alto Adige.It’s 1944, and Italy’s conscripts are starting to desert. Two such arrive in a mountain village in the Vermiglio comune: local man Attilio, who is borne there on the back of a Sicilian, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico, pictured bottom with Martina Scrinzi). Attilio’s extended family ignore the mutterings of local men who see Pietro as a shameful deserter, a “mummy’s boy Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry Léa Seydoux) just before the half-way mark. It's just another line from a script.The film’s working title had originally been the heavily ironic À notre beau métier (which translates as "to our beautiful profession"). Writer-director Quentin Dupieux has Seydoux and her co-stars Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard playing actors cast as actors who constantly criss-cross between the roles they are supposed to be portraying – in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.”Pablo Larraín’s Maria completes his trilogy of films about famous and charismatic women at critical moments in their lives, the others being Jackie Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) and Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021). It picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who Read more ...