Film
Nick Hasted
Francisca Alegría’s debut is an eco-fable about mourning and enduring love, for a mother and Mother Earth. We start by Chile’s River Cruces, where a mill pumps poison, and the fish hear a death-song in the previously “sweet and clear” water. Magdalena (Mia Maestro), who drowned herself here decades ago, breaks the surface, gasping and suddenly alive, and walks back into the world.The family Magdalena left behind are meanwhile riven. Daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela, pictured below) is a surgeon in the city, raising her own young daughter Alma (Laura Del Rio) and teenage Tomás (Enzo Ferrada, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since the first John Wick film from 2014 became an unexpected hit, the Wick franchise has blossomed into a booming business empire, also including comic books, video games and upcoming TV spin-offs. The title role has transformed Keanu Reeves, who remains guarded about his spiritual leanings, into the Zen master of action heroes.At 58, Keanu may be getting a bit long in the tooth for these hyper-intense heroics, though he gently mocks himself by occasionally limping briefly after some especially taxing incident (falling off a tall building, for instance, or getting run over by a charging SUV Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It starts innocuously, with paint. A woman is sitting in a hardware store, studying a travel guide for colour ideas, while briefing the chap mixing her order. But then, amid the sound of the mixing machine, we hear a commotion on the street, a woman's voice cries “they are taking me”, doors are slammed. A dash of pink paint lands on the customer’s pristine blue shoe.These opening few minutes of Manuela Martelli’s exceptional debut feature, from Chile, typify its singular tone and approach. This is the kind of economical, elliptical political thriller in which Latin cinema excels, building its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Brandon Cronenberg has inherited his father David’s eye for the twisted and the sinister. After the creepy mind-meld dystopia of 2020’s Possessor, Infinity Pool finds Cronenberg turning his attention to horror-tourism. It’s like The White Lotus on bad acid.Infinity Pool is set in the fictional coastal nation of Li Tolqa – the film was shot in Croatia, but wherever it is, Li Tolqa is an impoverished police state with a draconian legal system which stipulates the death penalty for all crimes. Queasily inverted camera angles and shots of a menacing sunset and dark, roiling waves suggest Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Beasts (As Bestas) is all of two hours and 17 minutes long, and yet to look away is never an option. Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reels the viewer in masterfully as he builds tension and suspense.A well-educated French couple are living out their rural dream in a valley in Galicia in north-western Spain. But there's a problem: the locals hate everything about them, and the couple's dream turns into one nightmare, and then many more. This is anything but the Spain of sunshine and allegría. Bleakness reigns here under rain and snow. There are visual imprints that just won’t Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Mr Williams (a wonderfully restrained, Oscar-nominated Bill Nighy) is taking time off work from his job in the Public Works department at County Hall in London. It’s the early Fifties and office life is very proper, with bowler hats and a strict hierarchy that reflects the class structure of Britain.He has stomach cancer but hasn’t informed his conventional son and grasping daughter-in-law, who live with him. Instead, he reveals his secret – “It’s rather a bore… the doctors have given me six months” – to a stranger (Tom Burke) whom he meets in a café in a seaside town. A pub crawl follows, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I'm proffering just a tad less than three cheers for Allelujah, the film version of Alan Bennett's 2018 Bridge Theatre play that is also that rare screen adaptation of Bennett not to be shepherded to celluloid by his longtime friend and collaborator, Nicholas Hytner.Instead, Richard Eyre is at the helm and why not, given that Eyre was running the National Theatre when Bennett and Hytner first hit it big together? And Eyre's stewardship allows him to call upon such totemic figures from different points in his storied career – amongst them, Julia McKenzie, Jennifer Saunders, and Judi Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 17th century romantic tragedy Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Ealing Studios' first Technicolor film, was conceived as a magnificent spectacle. The opulent costumes and Oscar-winning sets, shot in pleasingly muted tones and rendered almost 3D by Douglas Slocombe’s deep-focus cinematography, make for a visual feast in StudioCanal’s restoration. Sadly, it’s a banquet of stodge thanks to Basil Dearden’s cumbrous direction and dire performances by Stewart Granger and Joan Greenwood.Adapted by John Dighton and Alexander Mackendrick from the 1935 novel by the Sydney-born Liberal Party Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Jordan’s take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the first since Bob Rafelson’s Poodle Springs (1998), itself a lone outlier after Michael Winner’s misbegotten The Big Sleep (1978). No one seems to have considered why, or what they might add.Jordan is an Irish magic realist at his best, a gauzy poet around bloody themes. His ambitions here are more modest on an honest job of work. Liam Neeson, his friend and star in Michael Collins and Breakfast On Pluto, wanted to play Marlowe, William Monahan provided a script from John Banville’s Chandler estate-sanctioned novel The Black-Eyed Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s a huge amount to admire in Rye Lane, a new romcom set in south London. It’s the first feature directed by Raine Allen-Miller, who has conjured up a love letter to the neighbourhoods she grew up in. The street markets and much-loved Peckhamplex cinema, Brockwell Park with its walled garden and hilltop views, Brixton’s arcades with their mix of food and fabrics from all over the world, are all captured here in eye-popping colour. It’s refreshing to see this part of the city in all its multi-cultural glory and to escape the well-worn tourist landmarks that usually signify Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Trapped?” hisses 40-year-old Rachel (Virginie Efira) at her boyfriend, Ali (Roschdy Zem), who has a five-year-old daughter and is returning, for the sake of their child, to his ex-wife, Alice (Chiara Mastroianni). “What’s trapped you? Nothing at all. You can have kids or not have them, whenever you like.”This is one of the most vivid scenes in Other People’s Children, Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature. It is an attractive, quintessentially French film, set in Paris and beautifully shot by Georges Lechaptois, but rather cloying and well mannered compared to the wonderfully edgy, subtle An Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The moral of this story is that if you’re going out to commit a robbery, don’t take your iPhone with you. This was the grave error committed by TJ (Anthony Turpel) and his friend Ross (Chris Lee), whose attempted heist was foiled by an angry shotgun-toting citizen. TJ managed to get away, but Ross – carrying the iPhone containing incriminating evidence of the pair’s guilt – was shot and left for dead.When a distraught TJ confessed all to his sister Chloe (Bailee Madison), he thought his goose was cooked. However, Chloe had other ideas. Unleashing the deductive powers that have made her an apt Read more ...