Film
Nick Hasted
Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk-horror debut dissects a family’s treachery to the land in eventually apocalyptic fashion. It starts in silent, jagged style, the characters seeming as artificial as their minimalist house, abstract paintings and intensely designed rooms, set down like a lunar outpost in rugged Welsh farmland.Cadi (Annes Elwy) is up from the village to help Glenda (Nia Roberts) prepare a dinner party during which MP husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) means to seal a deal between the mining company which has enriched them and the neighbouring farm. As the canapes are Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Back in 1995, the name Brandon Lee made the headlines. Not the Brandon Lee as in son of Bruce, who’d recently met his death on the set of The Crow, but a schoolboy who’d chosen to use the same name. A strange hoax was uncovered. Lee was, in fact, Brian MacKinnon, and he was not 16 but 32, posing as a fifth-former at the august Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He did, indeed, go back to his old school, where he was a pupil, first time around, in the 1970s. But why? Jono McLeod’s entertaining and original documentary – he was at Bearsden with Brandon/Brian – mixes Daria-style animation Read more ...
graham.rickson
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-1920s purple patch, the wordy screenplay cobbled together from a pair of popular stage plays and the film directed in workmanlike fashion by Herbert Blaché, who wasn’t familiar with Keaton. Douglas Fairbanks was originally slated to star, recommending his younger colleague for the part of Bertie Van Alstyne when he found himself unavailable.That Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a romantic historical epic with elan, giving sensual immediacy to a fanciful secret history of the Eiffel Tower, here inspired by a forbidden, rekindled romance between Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) and Arlette Bourgès (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey).Director Martin Bourboulon evokes belle epoque Paris’s bustling modernity, suffused with a golden gaslit glow or fogged with shadow, as middle-aged widower and brilliant, honoured engineer Eiffel arrows through his working day. Already responsible for the Statue of Liberty’s internal structure, he now wants to build the Metro for the 1889 Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s first two features were horror films with bells on, their genuinely creepy chills accompanied by sharp, satirical social comment. Both were so good that there seemed absolutely no reason to doubt the next. And for a time, Nope actually feels like a step up, a flexing of the muscles that adds (as many have already, accurately, pointed out) a Spielbergian sense of wonder and spectacle to yet another brilliant conceit. It’s a surprise, then, when Peele doesn’t sustain the magic, and this outing descends into something of a mess – an engaging, far-out Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived.The point of Danny Garcia’s Nightclubbing doc is to stake Max’s, Kansas City’s claim as a punk epicentre, and challenge CBGB’s fabled status. Despite a few key interviewees, his low-budget, artless film does no one any favours. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Give Them Wings is the biopic of Paul Hodgson, who seven months after he was born in 1965 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he survived his precarious childhood to become a devout fan of Durham’s hapless Darlington FC – it’s criminal that this low-budget British indie wasn’t titled Give Them Wingers.An ex-civil servant and now a screenwriter and producer, Hodgson has spent his life confined to a wheelchair and hampered by a speech impediment. Directed by onetime Bond heavy Sean Cronin (who cast himself as a football thug), the film version of Hodgson’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The French seaside has been the setting for all kinds of summer holiday capers. We are used to the idea that this is a place where young people set about finding out who they are. At the top of the quality spectrum are Éric Rohmer’s well-observed comedies of manners like Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996). Down at the bottom, there are shockers like Axelle Laffont’s Milf (2018).The trope normally involves a portrayal of a relatively carefree existence. Emilie Aussel has a different idea in mind, however. Her feature debut Our Eternal Summer starts off Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One of the best scenes in this Brad Pitt starrer takes place in the quiet car of a Japanese bullet train, as two men seek to kill each without leaving their seats or disturbing their fellow passengers. Aside from being amusingly and skilfully executed, the conceit lends the scene a restraint that is sorely missing from the rest of this cartoonishly hyper-active movie. It would be churlish to deny Bullet Train’s goofy charm and expertly-choreographed action set pieces. But it largely depends on Pitt’s engaging central performance to hold one’s interest whenever its chaotically over-egged Read more ...
David Thompson
The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine.Yes, it’s a pleasurable road movie dealing with a bickering family packed into a car and making a trip that will affect all their lives, and they do burst into communal singing from time to time. But the music they enjoy are songs from pre-Revolution Iran, and for all the comic delights en route, the film has a deeper political resonance than most Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their married life going from one volcanic eruption to the next. These self-styled “volcano runners” were not just thrill seekers, but serious volcanologists keen to gain a better understanding of how volcanoes work so as to further science and save lives.Sara Dosa’s documentary about the couple from Alsace, who bonded over their singular obsession, is created mainly from footage shot by Maurice (and colleagues) along with glorious stills by Katia. Over a career lasting 23 years, the couple diligently recorded everything they witnessed and Dosa had access to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bob Rafelson finally exiled himself, unable any longer to countenance the consuming nature of his filmmaking. As director, producer and writer in the Sixties and Seventies, he had helped create both New Hollywood’s fabled moment of auteur freedom and its greatest star, Jack Nicholson, in films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.But he spent his last 20 years simply helping to raise his two children in Aspen, Colorado, “alive but lonely”, he told Esquire. When the magazine visited in 2019, they found him still innately combative, in constant pain from heedless adventures reflected in his Read more ...