Film
Sebastian Scotney
In the sports comedy Champions Marcus and Marokovich (Woody Harrelson) is a basketball coach in the lowly G League. He has ambitions to coach in the major leagues, but a sight of his highly flammable temper is normally enough to conclude that such dreams are likely to remain unfulfilled.When facing sentencing in a criminal court for driving into the back of a police car while drunk, Marcus is given a stark – and rather obviously contrived – choice. Would he, the judge asks, prefer to spend 18 months in prison or opt to play the only get-out-of-jail card he'll be offered, and just do Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius is a multiversal dandy, androgynous harlequin, English assassin and sometimes Cockney, an sf adventure hero who grew through four novels into a walker in the elegiac post-Sixties wastelands. He’s an apocalyptic Swinging Londoner, a protopunk Bond.Reincarnated in numerous subsequent novels, as Moorcock and compadres such as JG Ballard led literary responses to the Sixties’ glamorous and violent warps through experimental narratives forged from pulp fiction, Cornelius is a crucial decadent figure from a great writer. All the greater shame, Moorcock bitterly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Everything Everywhere All at Once lived up to its title Sunday night at the 95th Academy Awards by managing to win nearly everything everywhere almost all at once. The fragmented, seriocomic celluloid head trip won seven of the 11 Oscars for which it had been nominated, entering record books several times over not least for having two Asian actors amongst the recipients.“This is history in the making,” said Michelle Yeoh, the Malaysian actress sounding overcome as she triumphed as Best Actress in a tight race with Cate Blanchett, in career-best form in Tár. Blanchett’s chances were possibly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Junior (Alec Baldwin) peers through his airplane window at fluffy clouds with childish wonder, then a wolfish grin of opportunity. He turns to practising the signature from his latest mark’s stolen wallet, with Miami below for the taking.These opening seconds set out the mix of outlandish absurdity, fragile dreams and danger in George Armitage’s 1990 adaptation of Charles Willeford’s 1984 novel Miami Blues. This balancing act rests on Baldwin’s ambiguity in his first starring role as a goofy yet feral criminal. His piercing, Paul Newman-blue eyes light up a film-star handsome face, then dull Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The opening shots in The Middle Man show a brooding urban landscape lit only by refinery flames at night. The streets are deserted, with a lone car scuttling across them at an intersection. It’s Nowhereville, North America, though officially it's called Karmack. This vision of decay suggests anything but a comedy lies ahead. In fact, it’s hard to say precisely what kind of film this is. It's definitely a morality tale in which individuals contend with powers beyond their control: the law, the church, the medical profession, fate. But a comedy? Only the kind Dante wrote, perhaps: a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
John Hughes’ most beloved cult film feels like contraband now, a bracingly harsh bulletin from Eighties teen life, full of barbed, uncensored talk between its five school detention misfits – the titular “breakfast club”.It’s nothing like Hughes’ kinetic comedies Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) and Home Alone (1990), or the aspirational teen rebellion of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The Breakfast Club (1985) was written to be his directorial debut – though the more conventional, Molly Ringwald-starring Sixteen Candles (1984) was filmed first – and its Midwest schoolkids have a stagey Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This third Creed film outgrows Rocky, leaving Stallone’s bridging presence behind for a wholly renewed series. Starring again as Adonis Creed, the illegitimate son of Rocky’s late rival Apollo, Michael B. Williams’ directorial debut builds a richly conceived African-American world in and out of the ring.A double-prologue starts with a flashback to Adonis as a teen in 2002, sneaking out from his newly privileged life with Apollo’s widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) to roam LA with old children’s home friend Damian, till a violent incident sends Damian to jail. Fifteen years later, Adonis ends a Read more ...
graham.rickson
As films involving cats go, The Cassandra Cat (Až přijde kocour) is up there with the best. Part fairy-tale, part political satire, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1963 fantasy, shot on location in the picturesque village of Telcis, is an offbeat, unclassifiable gem. Unsurprisingly, the post-1968 Czech authorities disapproved, withdrawing it from circulation.Jasný’s characters have their lives turned upside down by the titular feline, a hefty tabby wearing dark glasses. If they're removed, those who the cat gazes at will change colour according to their nature.A prologue features Jan Werich’s affable Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) is an object lesson in how it was possible to make a feature on a tiny budget despite the restrictions of the pandemic lockdown. The film-makers stuck to the classical unities (time, place, action), cast themselves and members of the crew, called in favours from performer friends, and shot the movie over 10 days, mainly outdoors.It follows one day in the life of Danny (Kelley Kali, who co-wrote and co-directed the film) on the streets of Van Nuys. Recently widowed Danny is homeless and struggling to scrape the cash together for the down payment on a place to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Begin describing Aftersun to someone who’s not seen it and you’ll struggle. Charlotte Wells’ debut feature looks embarrassingly slight on paper, its 93 minutes following a young girl on a Turkish package holiday in the late 1990s with her youthful dad.The trip is mostly seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Glaswegian Sophie (Frankie Corio) in flashback, much of the footage recorded by her on a camcorder. Paul Mescal’s affable Calum, seemingly amicably separated from Sophie’s mum, is a superficially sunny presence. Wells hints at Calum’s demons only obliquely; there’s a suggestion of money Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a question. A romcom stars a man and woman, friends from childhood, both straight and with no romantic history. He's a Muslim and has decided to pursue an arranged marriage; she has a chaotic love life. What are the odds that they will end up together at the end of the film?No prizes for guessing correctly. But first-time screenwriter Jemima Khan takes us on a nicely circuitous route to get to that ending, and provides lots of smart one-liners on the way. When Kazim (Shazad Latif) tells Zoe (Lily James) an arranged marriage is now called “assisted marriage”, she replies: “Like assisted Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Partially banned in Pakistan, Saim Sadiq’s debut uses a young man’s affair with a trans woman to reveal the sadness and brutality of the nation’s patriarchal norms. It’s also a deeply sympathetic character study written from under the country’s skin, which Sadiq calls “a heartbroken love letter to my homeland”.Haider (Ali Junejo) is casually bullied by older brother Saleem (Sohail Saheer) and ageing patriarch Rana (Salmaan Peerzada) for his lack of machismo. It’s his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) who seizes a knife from him to slash a goat’s throat, its blood pooling darkly on courtyard tiles, Read more ...