Film
Saskia Baron
Greg Urbanski, Gary Oldman’s long-term producing partner, tells us on the commentary track that no film company wanted to touch the script of Nil by Mouth. Oldman was riding high as an actor in 1996, renowned for his shape-shifting performances as Sid Vicious and Joe Orton in the UK, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven and Dracula in the US. But moving into the director’s seat was seen as career suicide, especially with Oldman’s highly personal screenplay about working class family life in South London lacking star names. Luc Besson, who had had a big hit with Oldman in Leon Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her?The action takes place over several months in 1877-8, in Vienna, Bavaria and England, as Elisabeth's 40th birthday comes and goes. Again and again Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s 1877, and Austria’s Empress Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps) is first seen gasping under freezing water, skin blotchy with another extreme treatment to maintain her legendary beauty. Every day she constricts herself in her corset, as she’s constrained as Emperor Franz Joseph’s trophy wife. Nearing the dangerous female age of 40, the corset tightens notch by notch.Also a fashion icon popularly known as Sissi, the Empress remains Vienna’s biggest tourist attraction, further immortalised by the fairy-tale 1950s films starring Romy Schneider. In Corsage, director Marie Kreutzer instead Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the prototype for the Rue Morgue murders’ deducer, Auguste Dupin. He’s a legendary, retired police detective, asked to solve a death at the West Point military academy in wintry upstate New York. The suicide verdict of Dr Marquis (Toby Jones) is swiftly altered to ritual murder then followed by a second, with hearts carved out of hanged bodies. Landor Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson deal in the modern eerie and truly weird, placing relationships under supernatural pressure with unsettling empathy. Where genre-schooled peers such as Ti West and Adam Wingard splice post-slacker, naturalistic conversation with skin-flaying horror, Moorhead and Benson scare with cracks in reality, reflecting quietly broken protagonists.Styled as Moorhead & Benson, Benson writes, Moorhead is cinematographer, and the pair co-direct, produce, edit and sometimes star. Their self-sufficient cult has led to Marvel TV work on Moon Knight and Loki, but their Read more ...
graham.rickson
The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series first consisted of eight short films broadcast between 1971 and 1978, five of which were adaptations of short stories by MR James.Shot on 16mm film instead of videotape, most were directed by documentary maker Lawrence Gordon Clark. Itching to move into drama, Clark had persuaded the controller of BBC to let him make an adaptation of James’s The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. And, despite a tiny budget, the 45-minute film is a triumph. The chills are suggested rather than explicitly shown and offset with black humour, Robert Hardy’s Archdeacon, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The bond between humans and animals sometimes passeth all understanding. Wildcat is the story of 20-something British Army veteran Harry Turner, American ecologist Samantha Zwicker, and a young ocelot called Keanu, who becomes an almost mythic talisman of Harry’s battle with post-traumatic stress and suicidal urges.Harry’s experience with the army in Afghanistan, where he’d served as an 18-year-old, had left him shattered and burned out. He was medically discharged suffering from recurrent depression and PTSD, his brain clanging with terrible images of violence and death. He recalled seeing a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You may wonder: is this it? James Cameron’s Avatar sequel replays Earth’s colonial assault on Pandora in the original, cancelling out the blue-skinned native Na’vi’s victory under the Dances With Wolves-like, blue-white saviour command of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine mentally steering a genetically engineered Na’vi avatar.Sully has now merged into his avatar, and is chief of the jungle-dwelling Omaticaya, with an equally fearsome wife and five kids (including Sigourney Weaver as her previous character’s avatar’s teenage daughter, pictured below). Earth’s renewed assault Read more ...
David Thompson
It can be reasonably argued that Mike Hodges, who died on 17 December, was the finest director of British crime films since Alfred Hitchcock. Though Hodges succeeded in other genres, his Get Carter (1971), Croupier (1998), and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003) comprise an existential trilogy – and rumination on beleaguered masculinity – as potent as Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” series. In the spirit of Michael Caine’s Jack Carter, we raise “a tall thin glass” of Newcastle ale to Hodges and republish David Thompson’s 2020 interview with him.Mike Hodges arrived in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
1. Nightmare AlleyIt’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister, spectral visitation.Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power), it’s the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), whose journey starts with his miserably paid job at a travelling carnival.It could have used a trim here and there. But once you get sucked into the narrative, it’s a wild ride – like a ghost Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).Which makes me feel slightly less guilty for going back this year again and again to the softest cinematic comfort blanket I know, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1969). In new films I didn't review, I was entranced by the compelling performance of Renate Reinsve as the woman whose Read more ...