Film
Adam Sweeting
This heist-orientated black comedy could appeal to fans of the likes of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven or the same director’s Out of Sight, without ever quite matching their zip and sparkle. But there are enough loud bangs and big bucks to provide an entertaining night in (presupposing there are suitable lubricants to hand), though you wouldn’t think so from some of the ferociously negative reviews it’s been receiving.In the director’s chair is Doug Bourne Identity Liman, with a script from Chuck Maclean and Casey Affleck. The latter co-stars with Matt Damon, revisiting their home ground Read more ...
James Saynor
So, it falls to me to review perhaps the least-anticipated film of the year. Borderlands is based on an admired video game, and there may be nothing more hostile than pissed-off video-gamers.The tsunami of online negativity aimed for weeks at merely the film’s trailer was nothing compared to the onslaught that followed the lifting of review embargoes these past few days. The picture was slammed and dunked. If they think it’s all over for the era of Peak Superhero Movie, it is now. Come back Madame Web, all is forgiven.But there is, at least, a question of interest for readers of this Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I think my dad might have been an alien,” Adam (Faraz Ayub; Line of Duty; Screw) tells a self-help group he wanders into. What does that make him? He doesn’t feel at home anywhere – not with his family or, perhaps not surprisingly, at his job in a burger bar at Sky Peals motorway services.And in fact he is almost homeless: his white mother (Claire Rushbrook) is moving out of their flat with her new man, to Herefordshire - "Where's that?" he asks vaguely. She wants him to pack up his things but he stays in front of his computer, transfixed, while they take his bed apart, and carries on Read more ...
Justine Elias
“When we hear the formula ‘once upon a time,’ or any of its variants,” wrote Angela Carter in her introduction to her Book of Fairy Tales, “we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. We say to children: Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.” Moviemakers, our modern storytellers, often hedge their bets when exploring the fantasy genre, blending it with science fiction or the faux-historical epic, as though fantasy isn’t quite enough on its own. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part 2 (1974), Harry is a freelance genius of surveilled sound, whose mask of isolated control is incrementally dismantled by a recording of a clandestine lovers’ rendezvous in San Francisco. “It’s not an ordinary meeting,” he realises. “It makes me feel something.”The Conversation is a shadowy tone poem Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.Bursting into the room, Owen’s brutish widowed father (Fred Durst) pulls him from the wreckage. The scene is a metaphor for gender dysphoric Owen’s inability to start transitioning into a girl, a block that will leave him emotionally crippled. That is the nub of Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling second feature, not so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” urged King Lear, accompanied by the Fool, on the blasted heath. But that’s not quite snappy enough for the storm-chasers of Twisters as they drive their souped-up four-by-fours across the tornado-blitzed flatlands of Oklahoma. Their motto is “if you feel it, chase it!” which is pretty much all they do for the movie’s two-hour duration.So OK, it isn’t Shakespeare, but Lee Isaac Chung’s movie, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, sustains a hectic and frequently hysterical pace while delivering oodles of gobsmacking footage of terrifying storms threatening Read more ...
Sarah Kent
El Eco (The Echo) is a small village in Mexico’s central highlands, about two hours drive from Mexico City. But it might as well be thousands of miles away since it feels cut off from the outside world, especially for the women and children eking out a living there.Tatiana Huezo’s visually stunning film opens with Luz Ma and her mother rushing to save a sheep from drowning in one of the deep pools formed by the torrential rains that seem never to stop. With her father working away most of the time, this bright-eyed girl is her mother’s only helper. She can’t be more than 11 but we see her Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest is a test of stamina: a 3hr 15min study of a man paralysed by negative thinking. It also contains striking freeze-framed portraits of people and places that you want to pause and look at even longer than the editing allows, so beautiful are they.These shots presumably represent the photography of Samet (Deniz Céliloglu), a disgruntled late-thirtyish art teacher doing what he hopes will be the last year of his training in a remote part of eastern Anatolia. He yearns to return to a big city, preferably Istanbul. When we first see him, he is a very small Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A group of young people rent a cabin in the woods. A masked killer lingers nearby. Surely you know how the rest unfolds. The slasher and its well-worn tropes have been parodied, satirised and subverted for as long as it has existed. In fact, we seem to prefer watching these deconstructions compared to the actual, pulpy thing. Scream is after all the most successful horror franchise in history. But In a Violent Nature is arguably the most intriguing experiment in the genre so far. Here, the schlocky slasher is told from the perspective of a silent killer named Johnny who stalks a group of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Crossing is a remarkable step forward for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. There are elements that build on his acclaimed 2019 Tbilisi drama And Then We Danced, but his new film is rich with a new complexity, as well as a redolent melancholy, a loose road-movie that speaks with considerable profundity of the overlapping worlds in which it is set.The journey in question is from Batumi, the main seaport city of southwest Georgia, to Istanbul, where the greater part of the story unfolds, although narrative in itself is of less importance, Akin’s emphasis instead being on observational Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of American playwright Annie Baker’s work know what they are likely to get in her film debut as a writer-director: slow-paced interactions between characters thrown together in a confined space – a workplace, a B&B, a clinic – where long bouts of silence are not uncommon and little happens but everything important somehow gets said. Janet Planet is classic Baker in this respect. In some scenes, the birds and crickets make more noise than the humans, and whirring fans get solos. There’s also music, a rarity in a Baker stage production, here mostly coming from car radios or home Read more ...