Film
Hugh Barnes
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in securing finance for projects. There were no Archers movies at all between The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Oh…Rosalinda!! (1955), and both of those "total films" bombed with critics and audiences who were then into realism and violently opposed to exotic spectacles.And so, as if to rehabilitate themselves within the ultra-conservative British film Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The stories told by writer-director Carol Morley are poignant reclamation projects that demonstrate empathy for lost or troubled souls but don’t flinch from difficult truths.In the documentary The Alcohol Years (2000), Morley’s subject is her vanished self, a promiscuous, hard-drinking Manchester teenager. The part-dramatised Dreams of a Life (2011) questions why over two years elapsed before the death of Joyce Carol Vincent, a well-liked 38-year-old, was revealed by the discovery of her remains in her bedsit in busy Wood Green. The Falling (2014), inspired by reported events, explores the Read more ...
James Saynor
Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is. She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out. This is because Aitor, amid an extended family in the Basque country, wants to go by the name of Cocó – no, make that Lucía, she later decides. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Since its release in 1999 David Fincher’s Fight Club has become something of a cult movie with young men who recite lines from the script like mantras. "This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time". It seems likely his new film, The Killer, will inspire the same devotion with the same demographic.Michael Fassbender plays the titular killer, a professional assassin who we first meet leading a monastic life in a stripped bare We Works office in Paris. He’s observing the luxury apartment building across the street, able to wait for days for his target to appear in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margot (Emilia Jones; Coda) has made a terrible mistake. She’s landed up in bed with Robert (Nicholas Braun; cousin Greg in Succession) and realises the sex is going to be excruciatingly bad.How to tell him that she’s changed her mind? Can she leave before it’s too late? Or is it easier to get it over with, otherwise he might turn nasty? Maybe, as a last resort, she can make herself get turned on by his gratitude. “Look how much he wants us,” she tells her better self, who watches, cringing, from a corner of the room.Director Susanna Fogel (Booksmart; The Flight Attendant), and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The first casualty of war is not truth, as the saying goes, but humanity – and not just in the sense of collateral damage. Media reporting turns victims into news items, along with satellite images of wrecked buildings or tanks crawling through a desert.It happens every time. This morning, on BBC News, the Palestinian journalist Taghreed El-Khodary patiently explained what the Israeli blockade of Gaza means in terms of journalism. No reporter can reach the scene of the catastrophe to bear witness. “The human stories are missing,” she added.The same was true of the Iraq War and now, two Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it.I met Powell in his club, accompanied by his son Columba. It’s quite an uncanny experience seeing the two of them together in real life, so clearly warm and comfortable with each other. I’m familiar with them onscreen in Peeping Tom, made in 1960 when Columba was a child. He took Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining.Many would cite De Niro’s memorable "you talkin’ to me?" challenge to his own leering, gun-toting reflection in Taxi Driver (1976); others, the same actor’s majestic, slow-motion dance around a boxing ring as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), or his tragi-comic monologue at the end of that film; others the long tracking shot that follows Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill through the Copacabana in Goodfellas (1990).For me, the indelible scene comes earlier, in Mean Streets Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Nobody ever forgets The Red Shoes (1948) because it’s a movie that seems to change the way an audience experiences cinema. A story about a diverse group of individuals collaborating to make art, the film is itself a wonderful example of the process.With the help of the painter Hein Heckroth and the composer Brian Easland, both of whom won Oscars for their work on the film – not to mention Robert Helpmann’s almost Freudian choreography – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger combined words and images and music and movement to produce a “total artwork” that illuminates the unconscious as well Read more ...
Graham Fuller
At the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, closely adapted from the 2017 non-fiction book by the investigative journalist David Grann, is the true story of how the white former doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprii) was inveigled into slowly poisoning his Native American wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) for her share of oil wealth in 1920s Oklahoma.At least sixty – possibly hundreds – of Osage were murdered by whites for this reason. Scorsese, with his practiced eye for squalid crime scenes, spiderous psychopaths, and murderous odd-job men, depicts a passel of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rock Hudson was built up as a silver screen archetype of heterosexual manhood, with his 6ft 5in frame and muscular physique, but his story has subsequently come to epitomise a Hollywood system built on illusions and delusions. Supposedly the kind of chiselled hunk every swooning female admirer would like to catch her before she hit the ground, Hudson’s private life was based around his coterie of gay friends and his gay agent, Henry Willson. In this documentary, director Stephen Kijak explores Hudson’s double life with revealing thoroughness, not least through interviews with Hudson’s close Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Garth Davis’s Foe is cast from that classic science fiction mould that uses a fantastical premise to explore the commonplace, yet profound aspects of our lives; in this case, the intricacies, dissatisfactions and anxieties of a marriage.At the same time, it offers the sort of unsettling mystery and killer twists that have made the similarly inclined Black Mirror such a success.The time is 2065, with the planet in the grip of a now familiar (and all too likely) environmental catastrophe; in particular, the world is ravaged by drought, with all eyes are on the stars for a new home.Somewhere in Read more ...