Film
Graham Fuller
Movie Blu-rays and DVDs brim with superficially engaging extras that frequently fail to illuminate the main attraction. The opposite is true of Cry, the Beloved Country, which has been restored in 4K and newly released in StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics series of British films. The disc’s extras have been carefully chosen to contextualise Zoltán Korda’s potent 1951 drama as the first film to condemn apartheid.The white activist Alan Paton’s bestselling novel, published in Britain and the United States in February 1948, warned the world about the clampdown looming for the black majority in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Kristy Matheson won the job of BFI London Film Festival director, she spoke of the chance afforded by festivals for filmmakers, artists and audiences “to commune on a grand scale – to experience ideas, ask big questions and celebrate together.”Just three days into her first LFF, it’s clear that Matheson and her team are delivering on that vision. There is definitely a sense of provocation, celebration and film-buzzing community in the air. As ever, themes seem to have been percolated through the programming process, which reflect both current societal concerns and that unconscious Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, which won the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance this year, is an emotionally devastating account of the inhumanity of war.The Ukrainian videographer and his team – stills photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko – were trapped inside the eastern port city when it was besieged and shelled by the Russians last year. A brave and innovative visual storyteller, Chernov unblinkingly placed himself in harm’s way in order to capture the human stories behind the news footage of which, ironically, he was also Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This wasn’t a film to go and see with my 94-year-old father and hope I’d come out with my critical faculties intact and my handkerchief dry. The Great Escaper is an old fashioned, old school weepie about ageing, guilt and the horrors of war. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as well written or directed as its stars deserved. Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson have had better scripts in their long careers, but they both do a magnificent job with what they’ve been given and tears will flow.The Great Escaper is based on the story of Bernard/Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine below Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nothing goes out of date like new technology. Who now remembers how plain old Alan Sugar brought word-processing to the masses with the Amstrad PCW 8256, or how the Psion 5 was for a moment the last word in personal organisers?BlackBerry transports us back to the intoxicating rise and calamitous fall of the eponymous smartphone, designed by the Canadian company Research In Motion and which first appeared in 1999. The term “CrackBerry” – coined to describe the gadget’s addictive properties – was Webster’s Dictionary’s Word of 2006, and celebs from Leonardo di Caprio to Lady Gaga and Taylor Read more ...
mark.kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It has been seven years since Gareth Edwards directed, for me, the best of the new generation of Star Wars films, Rogue One. Having made Godzilla before that, it’s nice to see him return with a more personal project, a big, bold, beautiful, if flawed sci-fi epic. It’s still pretty derivative, in an open way, with nods to everything from Terminator, Blade Runner and District 9, to Apocalypse Now, among others, the connecting themes being the confrontation between humankind and technology, American militarism, fear of the other. Usefully, all of this Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Ken Loach has occasionally invested his realist TV dramas and movies with moments of magical realism – football inspiring them in The Golden Vision (1968) and Looking for Eric (2009) – but magical spaces in them are rare. In The Old Oak, as affecting a movie as any the veteran director has made and his 14th with screenwriter Paul Laverty, three sacred spaces (but a single church) work on the characters in vital ways. One is the beach where the depressed Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who runs a dying East Durham pit village’s surviving pub, encountered the stray dog that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The misty streets and lofty spires of Oxford star in this adaptation of Carolyn Weber’s 2011 memoir, Surprised by Oxford, in which she finds God while studying for an MPhil in English literature.Perhaps wisely, director and co-writer Ryan Whitaker steers clear of Carolyn’s conversion and the long-winded, theological agonising of the memoir, but this vaguely religious, Jesus-lite rom com, co-written by Weber, feels wishy-washy – though its cast, which includes Simon Callow, Mark Williams and Michael Culkin, lends it pizzazz. And it ticks all the Oxford sightseeing boxes, with William Holman Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Less is more, except when it isn’t. Among the latest batch of overlong Oscar-tipped movies by celebrated auteurs such as Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer with a running time of 181 minutes) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon, 207 mins), it’s a relief to find the iconic Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar bucking the trend with a 31-minute short that doesn’t test the audience’s mental and physical stamina.His second English-language movie is visually more ambitious than its predecessor, The Human Voice (2020), a short monologue adapted from Jean Cocteau and starring Tilda Swinton. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.That Gregory’s Girl exists at all feels like a happy accident; Forsyth’s background was in making low-key documentaries on Scottish subjects and his friendship with John Baraldi, founder of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prompted him to write the script. When a BFI funding application was rejected Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lasting just over an hour, The Nettle Dress is like a fairy story. It builds very slowly, each beautifully framed shot contributing toward a perfect little gem that tells a moral tale.A man spends seven years coming to terms with the loss of both his father and his wife from cancer by spinning nettle fibres into threads, then weaving them into a length of cloth. He recalls sitting beside a hospital bed, spinning while listening to his father’s breathing dwindle to a last gentle sigh, then during his wife’s final illness, spinning his way through sorrow.“There were hours of stillness and calm Read more ...