Film
mark.kidel
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le deuxième souffle (1966), Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).Watching it again after many years, I was struck by how it continues to feel fresh and original Indeed, still ahead of its time, not least because of Wolfgang Suschitzky’s documentary-style location shooting and intimacy with the action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters during her strange, isolated development from battered girlhood into a fragile young adult dismiss her mockingly as “Marsh Girl”. It’s only the kindly black couple who run the general store in Barkley Cove who take any trouble to get to know her or show any concern for her welfare (pictured below, Sterling Macer Jr as Jumpin' and Michael Hyatt as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Directed by the fraternal duo Anthony and Joseph Russo, who have helmed several of the colossally successful Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, The Gray Man ought at least to be entertaining and stuffed with blockbusterish thrills.And it is, darting around the world as it tells its amusing but wildly implausible story of two battling hitmen. The Russo boys would have a panic attack if anyone accused it of being a work of exquisite sensibility and artistic finesse, but there’s no need to worry on that score.Nothing about The Gray Man (based on Mark Greaney’s novel) is original, and it may even Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. His philosophy is that there's no task involving a staff member – or a member of their families – that's too petty or too personal for him be involved in, too. And it's his genius, of course, that ends up solving every problem. He justifies his actions because the buck stops with him: “Your problems become my Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) was in production while Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in August 1968. Predictably, the film was banned by the new Czechoslovak regime and it remained unreleased until 1990, though illicit video copies were circulating for several years before.Like Menzel’s Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains, Larks on a String took inspiration from the writings of Bohumil Hrabal, Menzel and Hrabal’s screenplay here based on a collection of short stories written in the 1950s. Set in the industrial town of Kladno, Hrabal’s characters are dissident members Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Arriving late at a performance… I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote of watching Brando on Broadway in 1946. “I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said, 'Watch this guy!' that I realised he was acting.”Kael was recalling the first, visceral shock of the actor’s capacity to merge with a role, having just watched its climax in Last Tango in Paris (1972), in which he dug agonisingly deep into his raging, flailing masculinity. Brando’s screen debut as paraplegic war veteran Ken Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972).It was his emotional investment which made generations unquestioningly sympathise with the film’s privileged family fallen on hard times – a standby of middle-class children’s literature revived as recently as Mary Poppins Returns.That belated sequel proved you can better a beloved original, and poured Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out?Barney Douglas's film – essentially a long-form interview with John McEnroe, interspersed with generous archive footage, contributions from family and friends including Billie Jean King, home movies and moody shots of the player-turned-commentator walking the streets of Douglaston in Queens, the New York neighbourhood Read more ...
mark.kidel
Pickpocket regularly makes it into the list of best films of all times. It is a film-maker’s film, more of an essay on the art of cinema and a discourse on crime than a thriller. Much French art house cinema is characterised by serious intent and intellectual rigour, and Bresson may be, more than any other auteur, the pioneer of a cinema in which reflection and thought play as much of a part as the display of narrative or emotional excitement.Michel, played by the non-professional Martin LaSalle, is the thief who learns the tricks of his trade from a gang of professionals, and plays through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Twenty-eight films and 19 proliferating TV series in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming wearisome, testing fans’ faith with grimly effortful new entries, and choking other sorts of film into the margins, like knotweed. But like the mid-20th century Western, superheroes are also a commercial template for anyone to tell any sort of story. When Taika Waititi’s dry satirist’s voice let rip on Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he combined all his and the genre’s wild virtues.And now, washing away the grim taste of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, here he goes again. With Odin dead and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May.Martin Bryant, aged 28, killed 35 people and wounded 23 in the historic site of Port Arthur (he’s now serving concurrent life sentences without the possibility of parole). At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in history. No longer, of course. And at the end the film reveals that although Australia acted fast to change its gun laws, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It takes some confidence for a first-time feature director to interrupt her essentially realistic first feature with a splash of psychedelic abstraction, but Jacqueline Lentzou doesn’t lack for visual or aural daring. Two-thirds of the way through Moon, 66 Questions, a semi-autobiographical drama written and directed by the Greek filmmaker, an astronomer’s view of a night sky appears. Myriad stars glitter in delicate colours, the image morphing into a silver and gold vortex as low-mixed spectral music plays and a staticky snatch of a telephone call is heard.If a literal interpretation Read more ...