Film
graham.rickson
That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.Lester’s masterstroke was to call in Alan Plater to help him rewrite the original script, the end result as much a political thriller as a disaster movie, following Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major film noir and has just been released on a Masters of Cinema Blu-ray.Written by the former newspaperman Sydney Boehm (who also scripted The Big Heat), the movie was directed by Hugo Fregonese, the nomadic Argentine auteur whose films frequently explored entrapment. Stanley Cortez’s expressionistic black and white camerawork, notably his use of chiaroscuro and huge closeups of faces juxtaposed to faces in medium shot within the same frame, captures rapid shifts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t finding it quite that simple.The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and in his last act in this world he appointed Lawrence to supervise the conclave that would choose his successor. But Lawrence has been struggling with his own faith of late, and negotiating the spider’s web of politics, personalities and clandestine intrigue that infests the sepulchral corridors of the Vatican threatens to overwhelm him.Yet he also realises that, much as he might wish for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Indian writer-director Payal Kapadia scored this year’s Cannes Grand Prix with her first fiction film, All We Imagine as Light, which follows three women trying to make a living in modern Mumbai. It’s a deserving winner, both exquisitely delicate and formally bold.Two of the women are nurses, colleagues at a specialist maternity unit, the third an older cook at their clinic, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), the only one who has had a child. Anu (Divya Prabha, pictured below, with Kani Kusruti), the youngest, is a lively young woman on the verge of a sexual liaison with a young tousle-headed Muslim Read more ...
Justine Elias
From James I’s campaign to wipe out witchery to the feuding sister sorceresses of The Wizard of Oz and the new film musical Wicked, spellcasting by supposedly wayward women has never been able to avoid persecution and misunderstanding.British filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, who admits a childhood fascination with TV's “good witches”, like Bewitched's Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery), recently found a deeper, more disturbing kinship with such figures. After the birth of her son, now three years old, Sankey suffered depression so severe that she spent months in a mother-baby Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later with the words, "to be continued" flashed up on the screen. Will filmgoers mourn that they have to wait an entire year to see the second part of this supercharged screen adaptation of the stage musical blockbuster that London and New York audiences can currently absorb in a single sitting? (Not for nothing has the show taken up seemingly permanent residency at Broadway's largest theatre, the Gershwin.)Wicked does nothing by halves except, it would seem, make Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of allegory for the circumstances that preceded the 53-year-old director's death from a heart attack last year. In 2016, Tseden was hospitalised after being roughed up by police when trying to retrieve his luggage at Xining Caojiapu International Airport. A diabetic, he was unable to take his pills while being held by the police.In the film, four guys from a local television station have been given a tip off about a snow leopard getting into a sheep pen Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The plight of persecuted minority groups around the world seems to be growing worse. As one form of response, a non-fiction film like Mediha works to make vivid the individual stories of people who might otherwise be reduced to statistics from places that are scarcely on the west's radar.The Yazidis of Kurdistan have been oppressed by Muslims since the days of the Ottoman Empire. The situation worsened when much of the land where they live was captured by Islamic State. Thousands of women and children were killed or taken prisoner and treated as sex slaves. Those who agreed to convert to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Faraon) is a state-funded superprodukcja, a 152-minute Polish epic, set, incongruously, in Ancient Egypt. First released in 1966, it wasn’t intended to be an Eastern Bloc copy of Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra; Pharaoh is an altogether darker, more sober work.Based on a popular 1895 novel by Bolesław Prus, Kawalerowicz’s screenwriting partner Tadeusz Konwicki saw the story as “a penetrating analysis of a system of power” rather than a straightforward historical novel. Polish cultural officials stressed that Pharaoh should be spectacular; what’s striking is how the visual Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s:“A botched independence swiftly followed by army mutinies and attempted secession by two renegade provinces, egged on by a colonial power. A charismatic black leader who comes to a sticky end, aged just 35. A first-of-its-kind UN military operation climaxing in a mysterious plane crash and the secretary-general’s death. Cold War skullduggery of the most nefarious kind, with a poison vial stowed in a safe. Not one, but two, coup d’états.”These Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less).Like the original film, which is specifically quoted several times, this one opens with a spectacular set-piece as Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) leads his massed triremes towards Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...