Film
Helen Hawkins
Babygirl starts with the sound of sex, piped in over the credits. There's a lot of it on our screens at the moment, from Disclaimer on Apple TV to Anora and Queer at the cinema, much of it noisily explicit. The intimacy co-ordinators must be having a field day.Back in the saddle is Nicole Kidman, some 25 years after she appeared naked on the tiny Donmar stage, almost within touching distance of the audience. She has been eliciting cooing responses for her “bravery” in taking on her latest role, of a sexually unfulfilled CEO of a big robotics company who embarks on a dangerous affair with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Iris (Laure Calamy) and her husband Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) haven’t had sex for four years. Waiting at school for the parent-teacher conference (they have well-behaved daughters aged ten and 15), she bemoans this fact to a friend, though, she maintains, she has no intention of leaving him.“Have you considered taking a lover?” asks a mother (Olivia Côte) who’s overheard her. There are apps, she tells Iris, even ones specifically for married people. No sooner said than done. From then on, Iris’s phone doesn’t stop buzzing.It’s Raining Men, (Iris et les Hommes is its more elegant French title) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from festival showings and its American release.This isn’t the easiest moment in history to be launching a film exploring its author’s Jewish heritage, thanks to the violent repercussions of events in the Middle East, but the historical baggage that comes with that heritage is all part of Eisenberg’s theme. Set to an eloquent and frequently melancholy Read more ...
graham.rickson
Czech theatre theorist Ivo Osolsobě’s tick-list for what constitutes an "authentic" musical is quoted in this release’s booklet. Namely that the songs should advance the narrative and express characters’ feelings, that singing, dancing and acting are integral elements, and that the story is rooted in real life.Director Ladislav Rychman and co-screenwriter Vratislav Blažek get all three elements right in The Hop-Pickers (Starci na chmelu), a Czech musical which was a huge critical and commercial success on its release in 1964. Blažek first conceived the project as a theatrical production Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Saskia BaronAnoraBetween the TemplesIo CapitanoDahomeyEmilia PerezGreen BorderIo CapitanoMonsterA Normal ManSoundtrack to a Coup d’EtatThe usual perverse list unfolds. Two beautifully made and thought-provoking films about emigration, an intermittently brilliant exploration of attitudes to disfigurement, a helter-skelter drama about a sex worker, a Jewish romance that everyone I recommended it to hated, two post-colonial documentaries made with extraordinary skill, a heart-stopping childhood drama. and the first opera to be made about a trans drug baron. Sorry to leave out Hit Man, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Someone told me recently that Netflix subscribers can view just 22 films made before 1980. I've no idea if this is true (please correct me if not), but it’s certainly a reason to continue watching and collecting films on physical discs. Plus, there’s the bonus features, booklet notes, commentaries and deleted scenes, all things which you won’t find on streaming services. Here’s my pick of the year’s Blu-ray releases, in no particular order:Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Second Run) is an eye-popping Egyptian epic from 1966. Filmed mostly in the deserts of Uzbekistan with scores of Soviet Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat the era’s belief system as concrete reality. There’s nothing glib or anachronistic about his films set among 17th century New England Puritans, 19th century fishermen or 11th century Icelandic vikings. So with his much anticipated remake of FW Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece and ur-horror film Nosferatu, Eggers takes us to its Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There's a tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s early films between misogyny and condemnation of the patriarchal suppression of women. The suppression was inherent in the original sources from which The Pleasure Garden (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) were adapted. Unconscious or not, the gynophobia that also flickers in these films is shared by The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927), and Rich and Strange (1931). That it's intensified in Hitchcock's mature work, culminating in Psycho (1960) Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a direct sequel to 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, a deserved Oscar-winner which, despite lasting just 30 minutes, has a marvellous cinematic sweep, every frame loaded with detail. Co-director Nick Park originally intended Vengeance Most Fowl to last half an hour, “but we started thinking of more ideas… it kept growing bigger.” The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) is one of Czech cinema’s best-loved pohadky, or "fairy tales".Director Václav Vorlíček and blacklisted screenwriter František Pavlíček (credited under a pseudonym) tone down the story’s supernatural elements and accentuate the realism; this Popelka (brilliantly played by Libuše Šafránková) lives with her stepmother and stepsister in a grubby, muddy village, the residents clad in muted greys and browns. Popelka isn’t a passive Disney princess: she’s feisty and resourceful, quick to answer her bullying stepmother and stepsister back.As such, Read more ...
John Carvill
It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here is framed around the women in Bogart’s life, starting with his aloof, undemonstrative mother, Maud. Proper consideration is given to Bogart’s first three wives, Helen Mencken, Mary Philips, and Mayo Methot. In particular, Mayo is rescued from the cipher status to which many previous accounts of Bogart’s life assigned her: she was a former Read more ...