Film
Markie Robson-Scott
There’s a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, said Graham Greene, and that ice plays a part in French director Justine Triet’s superb fourth feature, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.Set in the French Alps, the film begins with successful novelist Sandra (an amazing Sandra Hüller, totally inhabiting the role) being interviewed at home by grad student Zoe (Camille Rutherford) for her dissertation. They’re drinking wine and chatting flirtatiously.Then music on a loop, an instrumental version of P.I.M.P. by 50 Cents, invades the chalet. It’s so deafening that the interview can’t continue Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Switzerland isn’t exactly famous for parading its history during WWII. Remaining neutral from the conflict like its neighbour Liechtenstein, the Swiss benefitted from financial and armament deals with Nazi Germany, turned away Jewish refugees at the border and, post-war, failed to inform the remaining families of Holocaust victims about the deposits left by dead relatives in Swiss banks. While there has been some examination of this dark history in Switzerland itself over the years, it’s not a story that has been turned into movies or tv dramas that have played outside the country Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a tribute to a forgotten hero, gay black Quaker Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington, the vast peaceful protest that sanctified Martin Luther King as his oratory seemed to lift black America towards a Promised Land.King (Aml Ameen) is a cautious rising star here, a flawed figure who betrays Rustin early on, as his sexuality proves his Achilles Heel to Civil Rights movement enemies including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (grizzled Chris Rock) and black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright, pictured below). Produced by the Obamas’ Higher Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On the Adamant is an endearing documentary by the French director Nicolas Philibert, best known here for his 2003 film, Être et Avoir, a portrait of a single-room school in the Auvergne.This time around, Philbert has placed his camera on the Adamant, a purpose-built barge permanently moored on the Seine in Paris. It’s a drop in centre for city dwellers battling with mental illness – a place where sessions of art therapy, communal cooking and mediated group discussions help troubled people from falling further into despair. Philbert’s style is to eschew Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Dance First takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s most famous work Waiting for Godot. “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” says the tramp Estragon of Pozzo’s slave Lucky, who then proceeds to do both in a typically absurd Beckettian way.The Irish writer’s bleak worldview often manifested itself in slapstick comedy and nonsense, but you wouldn’t know it from James Marsh’s tasteful film, another biopic following his The Theory of Everything (2014) about Stephen Hawking, and the less successful portrait of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy (2017 Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Molly Manning Walker surprised herself by winning the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year with her rites-of-passage feature, How to Have Sex. Why the surprise? It’s a compelling debut.For the first five minutes, you might decide you won’t stay the course without earplugs, or a lobotomy. Before we see anything, the soundtrack is of a landing announcement that’s struggling against the din of a plane-load of raucous young partygoers, ready for the off. Walker deployed a huge cast to populate the hotel pools and clubs of Malia in Crete, but we are trapped at first in a taxi with three Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The jitters-inducing first feature directed on home soil by the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green is named after The Royal Hotel, the only pub in an Outback mining community removed from civilised society. To suggest all the blokes who drink there are potential rapists would be wrong: only 95 per cent of them are.This is bad news for the vulnerable Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), who have run out of money in Sydney and taken temp jobs as the Royal’s bartenders. They've bused out on a wing and a prayer to the blasted brown terrain where it stands (a building Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.And by the time Powell had entered his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, with The Spy in Black, in 1939, "Hitch" was on his way to Hollywood; while his career became international, Powell’s would, with the more English than the English émigré Pressburger by his side, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia doesn’t make you cry, you’re a hard nut to crack. The film records the fortunes of defectors fleeing North Korea, a hell hole that is more like a prison camp than a country.The phone rings with news that a family of five – an 80-year-old grandmother, her daughter, son-in-law and their two small girls – have crossed the Yalu River and are now trapped in China. They are desperate; if caught, they’ll be returned to North Korea to be tortured and either killed or sent to a concentration camp.The caller is part of the “underground railroad” network that helps Read more ...
graham.rickson
Not all Scorsese films are behemoths; Killers of the Flower Moon may last over three hours but After Hours, a low-budget black comedy released in 1983, packs an incredible amount into just 93 minutes.That Scorsese directed the film at all is a happy accident; Joseph Minion’s screenplay was set to be directed by the young Tim Burton, Scorsese opting to take it on after his first attempt to shoot The Last Temptation of Christ had collapsed.Filmed on location in New York, After Hours is dark, oppressive and claustrophobic. An early entry in the “yuppie nightmare” genre (see also Something Wild Read more ...
graham.rickson
Documentaries intended for cinema release don’t always come off, and cynics might suggest that Sheila Hayman’s Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn would work perfectly well as a BBC Radio 3 broadcast. Fortunately, Hayman’s visual flourishes and a sense of how to tell a good story make this film work.A closing caption points out, depressingly, that 90% of all music performed in the world’s concert halls is written by men, making the tale of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel all the more pertinent. Her biography is intercut with sequences showing pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason preparing to give the premiere of a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The story has often been told of how GW Pabst cast the American starlet Louise Brooks in his Berlin-made Pandora’s Box (1929) and fashioned his version of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu plays” around her transfixing performance as the helpless pan-sexual temptress – a projection of primarily male paranoia – who unintentionally destroys her would-be possessors. So, too, the story of the film’s role in the rediscovery and reinvention of its reclusive star as a writer and retired love goddess in the 1950s.Restored and re-released on a limited Masters of Cinema Blu-ray), Pabst’s sex tragedy has been Read more ...