Film
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is the conflicting claim to Kenyan land made by white ranch owners of English descent and the indigenous pastoralist people. In the 60 years since Kenya gained independence from Britain, tensions between the descendants of colonial Europeans and Kenyans have flared up periodically, and in recent years climate change has added fuel to the fire.Global warming has led to longer and more terrible droughts that scorch the grasslands and make it impossible Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over.Played by the craggy non-professional actor Roger Marten, frequently shot in closeup, the farmer, a solitary widower, never speaks. Played by Emily Beecham and Rory Kinnear, Laura and David, each of whom covets the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen.In one scene, for instance, West Bank teenager Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), burning with anger and grief – his house has been bulldozed and his brother shot dead by a Jewish settler – sits down in front of the evening news: “Bombs continued to pound Gaza today,” announces the unseen newsreader Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. Liptrot’s screenplay, cowritten with Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt, turns her into a young woman called Rona, played by Ronan, but gives her an alternative CV as a research microbiologist by training. Actual Liptrot scraped a living cleaning oil-rig workers’ toilets at home on Orkney, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The trial of the left-wing intellectual Pierre Goldman, who was charged in April 1970 with four armed robberies, one of which led to the death of two pharmacists, was known as “The Trial of the Century” – even though the century wasn’t over yet, as one of the prosecutors quipped.It is over now, of course, but even though the events explored in Cédric Kahn’s semi-biographical courtroom drama unfolded more than half a century ago, there’s an electrifying currency to the film, which touches on a marvellous array of French discontents harking back to the Dreyfus Affair. At the same time its Read more ...
Justine Elias
Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe.After 16 years as a working artist in Brussels, Barry inherited her father’s Wexford farm and grew her flock. Today she tends 29 white Lleyn sheep, whose black-lined eyelashes make them look like hung-over nightclubgoers who fell asleep in their makeup.In Cara Holmes’s lyrical documentary, Barry – and the sheep and the Border Collie watching Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you.French director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature (her first was Revenge in 2017, a rape-revenge thriller) is a stylised commentary on the female body, Hollywood, sexism and ageism. It’s over-long and repetitive but still packs a gloriously hyper-real punch, shot by Benjamin Kracun, full of vivid colour, wide-angled lenses and movie references such as Carrie, Alien, The Elephant Man, Frankenstein, Barbie, with a Psycho shower-head Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
“Are you a serial killer?” asks a woman sitting in a pick up truck with a man she just met at a bar. The neon sign from the motel they are parked outside bathes the couple in cool, blue light. “Do you have any idea of the risks a woman like me takes every time she agrees to have a bit of fun?” As we see this very woman being chased by the same man in the next scene, we wouldn’t be wrong to assume Strange Darling is a cat-and-mouse thriller with a #MeToo slant. Instead, this twisty and bold film from JT Mollner (Outlaws and Angels) will spend the next 96 minutes toying with these assumptions. Read more ...