Film
Nick Hasted
James Gunn is running the whole DC show now, but his Guardians films have stayed free from Cinematic Universe snares, even the group’s Avengers cameos beaming in from their own pop-art corner. This swansong is their indulgent, sometimes meandering double-album and darkest chapter, making a visceral anti-vivisection and anti-eugenics case.Volume 3 resembles Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in the shadows cast over a dayglo series by a particularly vicious villain. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s High Evolutionary was a relatively benign, species-splicing Dr Moreau, turned by later writers into a Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Nowadays Robert Graves is best known for his later and least interesting works on Greek myths and Roman emperors, but at his best, in the first decade of his writing life, as a war poet (Fairies and Fusiliers) and war memoirist (Good-Bye to All That), he was a powerful mythmaker in his own right.He was also borderline absurd, a cut-price Lord Byron whose scandalous private life – in particular the Jazz Age ménage à trois with his wife Nancy Nicholson and a charismatic American literary critic, Laura Riding – somehow overshadowed his literary career.The title of writer-director William Nunez’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it that drives Belgian filmmakers to make sad and disturbing films about children? Is it the influence of the Dardennes Brothers, who over a 20-year career have made superb features exploring how brutally society treats its most vulnerable (Tori and Lokita, The Kid with a Bike, The Child among others)?My Belgian friend Anne-Marie Huby drily observes of her countrymen: “We are very adept at despair.” Is that it? Or is it that Belgian directors makes plenty of jolly action movies, costume dramas and romcoms but they just don’t win prizes at film festivals and hit the Read more ...
graham.rickson
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Here's another small gem of a film graced with a fine central performance by Jim Broadbent, after his lovely turn in The Duke. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is, like the earlier film, the story of an eccentric older man who embarks on a risky enterprise, though it’s less comic and twice as affecting.Broadbent has another grumpy wife here: after Helen Mirren in The Duke, Penelope Wilton (pictured below with Broadbent) plays Maureen, a sour woman with little to bring joy to her days. His Harold is a quiet man, living modestly in retirement in south Devon, who is suddenly galvanised into Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been a long time since I went walking in the mountains – too long. And Joke Olthaar’s film Berg (mountain) has intensified my longing for that very special experience.Three walkers follow the stony paths of the Alpine ranges in Triglav National Park, Slovenia and, in voice-over, we hear their thoughts: “I felt a deep connection with myself and the universe. I felt infinite peace… The three of us stand here and look into the depth from the edge of the abyss. We love the same place.” So far so serene, but then the words “only much later I heard what had happened” trigger fearful Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Reading an interview with the French director of Rodéo, Lola Quivoron, you come to realise her compelling film about dirt-bike-rider culture relied on a sage piece of casting. Despairing of ever finding a lead for her film project, Quivoron chanced upon Julie Ledru on Instagram and the first-time actor became a key creator of the narrative. The lone girl rider in a gang of illegal road-bikers, Ledru’s Julia (main picture) is a uniquely impressive character: mixed race, fearless, and far more emotionally intelligent than the young men she hangs out with. Ledru, like Julia, is from the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lisa Cortés’s fast-paced documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything opens with a TV interview made in 1971, 16 years after the rock 'n' roll pioneer became an overnight success with groundbreaking hits like "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly".Wearing a baby pink onesie and a crown-shaped tiara, Little Richard smiles coyly to camera, bats his beautifully made-up eyes, and says, “A lot of people say I’m shy, but I let it all hang out – the love, the tenderness, the kindness. You ain’t supposed to hide them; if you’ve got ’em, God damn it, show ’em to the world.”And show them Read more ...
graham.rickson
The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a booklet interview with David Thompson that Balthazar “was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the end”.Watching the earlier film after seeing EO highlights how very different the two films are. Bresson’s donkey is seen very much through the eyes of the humans who variously love and abuse him, while Skolimowski shows us a confusing, often Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his elimination, the urbane High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is forced to turn detective to learn their veracity. It’s not his fault that Inspector Clouseau might do a better job.Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.Set in Oslo and Gothenburg, it’s the story of 20-something Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who works in a trendy coffee shop and feels side-lined by her installation artist boyfriend, Thomas. She’s also jealous of her friends who have more interesting jobs and craves respect from them and from Thomas. A cool art gallery has just put on an exhibition Read more ...