Film
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to numerous arguments and disagreements over script, casting etc, nine years have elapsed since Expendables 3 hit the multiplexes, and Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew were perilously close to being over the hill even then. In Expend4bles, age has duly withered them even further, a fact wryly acknowledged by director Scott Waugh and his screenwriting squad. Dolph Lundgren, now vaguely resembling an ancient relic dug up from a peat bog in Jutland, has become a comic figure whose sniper’s skills are severely hampered because he hasn’t made that latest trip to SpecSavers.Jason Read more ...
James Saynor
If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie offers subtitles in different colours to get the idea across.In a backwoods burg full of shotguns, bears, people dressed as bears, worrying things in the forest and an awful lot of barking dogs, the Romanian auteur shows us how different folks can rub along quite well – up to a point when bigotry unfolds that would make Enoch Powell blanch.Matthias ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the decimation of the Amazon rain forests or the melting of the polar ice caps, Morris decided to spend a year filming the barley field that surrounds the 4,000-year-old Boscawen-Rôs East menhir, or standing stone, four miles north-east of Land’s End in Cornwall. According to the late earth mysteries writer John Michell, the so-called Longstone and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
François Truffaut said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because cinema inevitably glorifies the horror of conflict. The premise was robustly challenged over the weekend at the Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual film festival, Side By Side, which screened a handful of films, documentary and narrative, feature-length and short, that compelled the audience to reflect deeply on war’s horrific nature.A recurring festival theme was a sense of filmmaking itself being overtaken by events in the wake of last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine. In I Did Not Want to Make a War Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
You can imagine the thought processes that brought Kenneth Branagh’s latest adventure as Poirot, his third, to the big screen.“Memo to self: Find an Agatha Christie/Poirot story that hasn’t been done to death already, in fact isn’t well known at all so isn’t an automatically ‘spoiled' plot. Make it (inexpensively) exotic but still ‘period’ by moving the location to Venice in 1947, which looks very much like La Serenissima in 2023, minus the human sea of tourists following a guide holding up an umbrella. And there are still no cars and street furniture, and definitely no e-scooters, to CGI out Read more ...
mark.kidel
Partie de Campagne (1946), while not being one of French cinema giant Jean Renoir’s best-known films, unfinished and just under 40 minutes long, is still regarded as an important if not essential example of the director’s multi-faceted and often innovative work.The somewhat fragmentary story, based, along with many French movies, on a short story by Maupassant, focuses on a brief moment of love between Henriette and Henri, a fun-loving charmer, and evokes the transience of romantic love. The theme of class-difference, which runs through the left-wing director’s work and is central to his Read more ...
AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T Rex review - musical doc falls between two stools
Adam Sweeting
Seeking to be both a documentary and a musical tribute to Marc Bolan, AngelHeaded Hipster doesn’t quite pull it off on either count. It’s based around the making of an album (whence the film gets its title) of versions of Bolan’s songs by an interminable list of artists including U2, Joan Jett, Devendra Banhart, Macy Gray, Beth Orton and many more, produced by Hal Willner and released in 2020. Willner, who died shortly before the album's release, made his name by creating multi-artist tributes to such fabled names as Charles Mingus, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen, but one might hesitate to put Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Older fans of T Rex will get pleasure from hearing the band’s tracks and reliving some of the buzz of being a dino-rocker, but, despite the title, this isn’t strictly a fan film. Describing what kind of film it is, though, would involve a serious spoiler, which points to its wonky narrative ambitions. It expends a lot of screen time building up to an unsurprising reveal (more on that below).The film opens with a charabanc of children from a Liverpool care home on an outing to a T Rex gig in Manchester in 1976. We meet some of them en route to the concert, all with sparkly face paint and Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Saphead gave Buster Keaton his first starring role in a full-length comedy, but 1923’s Three Ages is the first feature film which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Two-reelers were a form where he could go, in his words, “wild and crazy”, the more outlandish the visual humour the better.Feature films were based on narrative flow, Keaton later commenting that the jokes “had to be believable or your story wouldn’t hold up.” Watch Our Hospitality or The General and you’ll see what he means. Still, the gags which really stand out in Three Ages are the daft, unbelievable ones: Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A cameo by Jeremy Allen White wouldn’t usually excite interest, but the star of Disney+’s The Bear is big box-office now, so his presence in Fremont, however brief, will probably guarantee it an audience. There the curious will also find a gem from the Iranian-born director Babak Jalali and a serenely powerful debut performance by Anaita Wali Zada, who gives this simple-seeming project an inner glow.Fremont is a city in California’s Bay Area that has become home to a sizeable population of Afghan refugees. Donya (Wali Zada) is one such, a former translator for the US Army who has had to leave Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“There’s nowt so queer as folk”, they say, and Life on the Farm amply proves the point. A cassette slides into the slot; “play” is pressed and a middle-aged man appears on screen at the gate of Combe End Farm. “Follow me down”, he says to camera,”I’ve got something to show you.”We’re in the realm of home movies and opinions differ on the “something” he wants us to see. “It’s like a horror movie,” says one viewer. “I can’t tell if this man’s a genius or a psychopath”, says Nick Prueher of Found Footage Festival which tours the world with VCR parties. “We’ve been collecting weird VHF tapes Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In the mood for love? It’s over 23 years since Wong Kar-Wai’s swoony, bittersweet film of that name reset the bar for the art-house love story. Now comes Celine Song's Past LIves, an entirely different kind of bar-setter but with a similar tough-but-tender core. It’s an unshowy, slim film, but it takes on hefty topics: can love survive for decades, can it cut through cultural barriers? What does a relationship need to survive?The autobiographical plot was triggered when Song found herself in her home town, New York City, sitting between her American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart Read more ...