Film
Demetrios Matheou
Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema.The sense of voices being heard is even shared by the titles of two films made by and specifically about women, both of which must feature strongly in the upcoming awards season that leads to the Oscars. She Said concerns the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie Strode (Curtis) is healed enough to be bashing out a trite survivors’ memoir, and bonding with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Mabichak, filmed with Green’s customary lustrous devotion to youthful female beauty). A spectacular pre-credits sequence meanwhile introduces Corey (Rohan Campbell, pictured below with Mabichak), whose typically catastrophic spell Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This extraordinarily moving film made history when it became the first documentary to win the top non-fiction awards at both Sundance and Cannes. All that Breathes is the second film directed by Shaunak Sen, shot in Delhi in 2019/2020 during the violence that followed the Citizenship Amendment Act that discriminated against Muslim migrants.Sen’s cameras follow two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud who have devoted their lives to saving the city’s sick and injured black kites. Scavenger raptors, the birds circle the noxious, darkened sky. They live off urban scraps and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There were decidedly mixed, north-south emotions on the film festival circuit last week: just as the latest edition of the BFI London Film Festival opened, administrators announced the immediate closure of its illustrious UK cousin, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, along with two of Scotland’s most beloved cinemas. So just as one capital prepared to celebrate cinema – and cinemagoing – another was struggling to come to terms with a kick in the teeth to its cultural heritage, caused by the deadly combination of rising costs and declining, cash-strapped audiences. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Santiago materialises through white clouds like a secret city, concealed by the elements. In this conclusion to Patricio Guzmán’s trilogy documenting the long nightmare of Chile’s coup through its landscape, the Cordillera – the country’s Andes spine – is an impassive, monumental witness to the Pinochet regime’s buried acts, and victims’ graveyard. The land, Guzmán suspects, can remember.Guzmán endured mock executions then entered exile after Pinochet’s fatal, CIA-backed 1973 ousting of left-wing President Allende. In The Cordillera of Dreams and its predecessors, the boy lover of science- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard III is a controversial figure, and will remain so after this film, which tells the remarkable story of how Philippa Langley, a woman with no background in academia, archaeology or as a historian, led the search to find the grave of the “usurper king”.It comes with a slew of accusations and counter accusations; some historians believe it wrongly absolves the king of any blame over the murders of his nephews, the young “Princes in the Tower”; Leicester University (whose archaeologists performed the successful dig) say they led the excavation, while Langley says she did but was sidelined Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Antonioni was a poet of enervated alienation, sold, like early Godard, by profoundly beautiful actors, and perfected in the sun-bleached lassitude of Monica Vitti’s search for her missing friend in L’Avventura (1960).He wandered the world after 1964, applying his hip imprimatur to cultures in flux, from a fantastic, sexy, paranoid Swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) to Communist China in Chung Kio, Cina (1972), and drew Jack Nicholson into his games of existential ennui in The Passenger (1975). Returning to Italy for one last Vitti film, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980), which he dismissed, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm.It's 1933, and Bert (Christian Bale) is a Catholic-Jewish doctor with a glass eye helping fellow traumatised Great War veterans in New York. His veteran best friend, lawyer Harold (John David Washington), asks him to autopsy their beloved commanding officer, whose daughter (Taylor Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nitram is an object lesson in how to make a responsible film about a mass shooting, right down to not using the fame-seeking perpetrator’s real name as the title but the mocking ananym given to him by bullies at school.Scriptwriter Shaun Grant has drawn on accounts of the 1996 gun rampage at the heritage site Port Arthur in Tasmania. The 19th century convict colony became infamous as the scene of the worst massacre in modern Australia's history, leaving 35 people dead and another 23 injured. We don’t see the killings – there is no vicarious, visceral horror on screen. Instead Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it with pushy Finnish mums and their acrobatic teenage daughters? Just weeks after the release of the Gothic fantasy Hatching, which focused on a gymnast having a Cronenbergian breakdown under pressure from her influencer mother, comes Girl Picture. This time the camera is on an ice-skating prodigy torn between pleasing her mother or revelling in her new romance with the coolest lesbian in school. Best friends Ronkko (Eleonoora Kauhanen) and Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) work in a juice bar in a mall. Over the course of three Fridays, the girls swap notes on their sex lives and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, is preposterous. But it’s as pretty as a pink cloud. The director, Anthony Fabian, knows that in these grim times, escapism is good box office.But still, would it hurt to get some things right? Why have a British charlady in 1957 saying, “You go, girl”? Never mind. It’s a mix of Mary Poppins and Emily in Paris (one of its stars, Lucas Bravo, plays a bespectacled, quasi-intellectual accountant here). You almost expect Dick Van Dyke to appear, bicycling through the smog. It’s sanitised and sweet, an Instagram dream, without a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Remote is Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film. The New York-based artist was commissioned by Artangel, an organisation renowned for its promotion of interesting projects. Support also comes from art institutions across the world – Beijing, Denmark, Korea, Louisiana, Montreal and Stockholm. And to cap it all, the film is being premiered at Tate Modern during the week of Frieze, London’s major international art fair.With this level of global support, expectations are bound to be high – which makes it all the more shocking that Remote is irredeemably silly. Conceived during lockdown with writer Read more ...