Film
Sarah Kent
From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.The year is 1901, the location a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego, a wind-swept island at the southern tip of South America. Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who owns large swathes of land in Argentina and Chile, is erecting a fence to prevent the indigenous people from killing his livestock.A scream rends the air; the fencing cable has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s Chilean Western The Settlers traces the roles played in the genocide of the country’s indigenous Selk’nam people by the Spanish businessman José Menéndez (1846-1918) and his brutal Scottish sheep station manager Alexander McLennan (1871-1917).Longtime film editor Gálvez Haberle’s feature debut as a director self-consciously harnesses the tropes of Hollywood and spaghetti Westerns, as well as heritage dramas in thrall to ruling class opulence, to deconstruct those genres as farragos of lies – cinema’s equivalent of the history “written by the winners”. The Settlers, Read more ...
James Saynor
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a novel about Auschwitz is either not a novel, or not about Auschwitz. So that sounds like a “no” to Holocaust movies, too. It was a belief that gathered pace among many thinkers after Schindler’s List (1993), despite the Spielberg film’s widespread acclaim.Mysteries that you puzzle at, surprising twists at strategic points, “character journeys Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mystery surrounds the provenance of Matthew Vaughn’s new spy fantasy, Argylle. Allegedly, it’s based on the debut novel of the same name by Elly Conway, with Bryce Dallas Howard playing a novelist called Elly Conway in the film. But evidence of the existence of a real-life Conway is hard to find, though there was a rumour that it was a pseudonym used by Taylor Swift (who denies it).But it’s all myth-making grist to the film’s fantastical mill, in which many games are played with multiple identities. Vaughn has previously mucked about with the spy-thriller formula in his Kingsman movies, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme battle of the sexes, carried by extravagant pop art designs and its star Dagmar Lassander’s playful pertness.Dr Sayer (Philippe Leroy) is a wealthy head of a philanthropic institute who spends his weekends sadistically dominating prostitutes. Let down by a regular, he’s delighted when a previously unknown journalist in his press department, Maria ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying John of Gaunt’s famous monologue lauding his ailing England in Richard II.Keith (also a fence builder in Isaacs’ 2020 The Filmmaker’s House) performs the speech before the camera held by the protagonist Lori (Lori Yingge Yang), a young Chinese documentarist who has come to Thaxted to improvise a film.A former anthropology student of Isaac, Lori Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its virtuoso performance from Tilda Swinton in a dual role. Other special features include a Q&A with Hogg, Swinton and Francine Stock.In LA, Hogg says, where she’s shooting Présages in preparation for a film she’s planning there, the constant regeneration of the city “creates the layers of ghosts, the reverberations of the past.” And she recounts an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two entirely different (and lauded) runs, the story of a Southern Black woman's self-empowerment across nearly 40 years is a movie once again, this time drawing on the stage musical and carrying over several alumnae from that show – leading lady Fantasia Barrino included. Fantasia, as the then single-monikered talent was known at the time, took over Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. It starts with the familiar sight of a thirtysomething writer, Adam (Andrew Scott), in a modish high-rise flat, staring at his laptop screen, thoughts and typing fingers frozen, with the lights of London spread out below him. Then an alarm sounds, and he wearily makes his way down to the tower block’s designated meeting point outside. Where there is nobody to meet. Eerily, he seems to be the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wax lyrical about the contents of a British Transport Films short and you might start sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, railing about things being better back in the day. On the evidence of this 15th volume in the BFI’s anthology series, many things clearly were. Take 1969’s Multiple Aspects, which shows engineers remodelling the lines leading into Paddington Station, the work completed on time, and presumably on budget, in exactly five weeks. Though it’s disconcerting to watch the workers slaving away without hi-vis jackets or protective headgear, just inches away from passing trains, as Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting to compare the two. Both feature pregnant women dealing with the traumas of delivery for the first time; the waters break both in macro and microcosm. After the Flood has too much plot – it’s one of those crime dramas in a small Yorkshire town where everyone, from the pregnant police officer (Sophie Rundle) to her activist mum ( Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is not a roguish friend but a spiky pupil at the boys’ school in New England where he teaches classics. It’s a masterclass in meshing screenwriting, acting, cinematography and music direction in a seamless blend. The script, by David Hemingson, takes an old trope – the curmudgeonly teacher versus the bright but wayward student – and gives Read more ...