Film
graham.rickson
Salvador Dali loved when he saw it, describing Steven Arnold’s debut feature as “an extraordinary, fantastic film”, subsequently inviting Arnold to help decorate his museum in Figueres.Maybe you just had to be there; viewing the film on a sunny afternoon in suburban Leeds can’t compete with hanging out at New York’s St Regis Hotel in 1974. Second Run’s release of this 1971 curio is well worth a look, though I’d suggest watching the videoed introduction from media curator and film historian Steve Seid before pressing play. Seid was instrumental in the preservation and rerelease of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The piercing-eyed German actor Udo Kier is best known for his supporting roles in many high-profile films, including those of Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Fassbinder. In Swan Song, he carries off his first starring role magnificently as wry ex-drag queen and Ohio hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, though the film itself is rather meandering and has mawkish, saccharine moments.Director Todd Stephens (Another Gay Movie; Gypsy 83) based Mr Pat on a real character from his home town of Sandusky, Ohio. The film is a nostalgic journey, looking back at the days before gay dads became a norm (“I Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A birthday weekend in Devon goes rather badly wrong in All My Friends Hate Me, the new film co-written by its leading man, Tom Stourton, that looks guaranteed to make shut-ins of us all.The antithesis of the warm-and-fuzzy gatherings proffered onscreen over the years by the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Richard Curtis, Andrew Gaynord's film directing debut is compulsively watchable, in an increasingly grim way. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering somewhere past the midway point why the likeable-enough Pete (Stourton) doesn't just cut his losses and drive away.The character's name can' Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Franchise burnout continues apace, in this asteroid strike of a finale. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed the previously agile and humane Marvel machine weighed down by plot mechanics and fan service, and this Jurassic Park/World trilogy unification bout proves a pointless, often ponderous 146 minutes. As post-pandemic cinema moves to total dependence on such sequels, their creative entropy could be an extinction event for filmgoing itself.Mainstream cinema has long been based on childhood nostalgia, and is now aimed at adults weened on Jurassic Park, the Star Wars prequels Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Commenting on Australia’s horrendous colonial history at the start of an audio commentary packaged with this BFI Blu-ray release of John Hillcoat’s impeccably directed, newly restored The Proposition (2005), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas declares, “It’s fucking awful.”Critics are usually more circumspect on the record, but Heller-Nicholas’s reflection on the genocide of the First Nations people and the attendant squalor visited on the Lucky Country by the lawless settlers of the 19th century strikes the right note. She and her colleague Josh Nelson sustain her anger and disgust throughout their Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of form, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections,” he wrote. He lived on the island for 40 years and made several films there, including Through a Glass Darkly, Persona and the TV series that inspired millions of divorces, Scenes from A Marriage.In Bergman Island, the Swedish director is an inspirational presence, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This maggoty English pastoral blurs into folk- and body-horror, as Alex Garland dissects a relationship’s mournful aftermath, and sends toxic masculinity into toxic shock.Harper (Jessie Buckley) rents a grand Cotswold cottage in the grounds of bumbling, benign aristo Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear, pictured bottom with Buckley), seeking to put her marriage’s brutal end behind her. It still haunts her in broken flashback: facing James (Pappa Essiedu, picture below with Buckley) in a sunset-red flat as their marriage viciously unravels. Essiedu’s soulfully demonic James is unable to understand why Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Camera Is Ours features films made from 1935-1967 by women like Marion and Ruby Grierson, Evelyn Spice and Margaret Thomson, whose names should be engraved in the history of British film-making.Ever heard of them? Probably not as, surprise, surprise, they’ve been overlooked – until now, that is. This BFI two-disc DVD release includes 10 newly restored shorts along with interviews with Sarah Erulkar and Kay Manders and a feature on Jill Craigie, better known as the wife of labour leader, Michael Foot.“We were a movement,” Manders tells Barney Snow. “We had ideas in common. We thought we Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roger Michell’s films described a range of Englishness, from Notting Hill’s foppish comedy to acerbically humane Hanif Kureishi scripts (Venus, The Mother, The Buddha of Suburbia), Cornish Gothic (My Cousin Rachel) and his last feature, The Duke, which warmed working-class malcontent Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren’s frozen marriage with Wellington’s stolen portrait.The Duke’s docu-slivers of early ‘60s London dovetail into this film, finished the day Michell died. Other subjects were considered: Nick Drake, or apartheid-busting cricketer Basil D’Oliveira. It might as well be the Queen, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For die-hard Juliette Binoche fans – don’t cross us, we get angry – Between Two Worlds is heaven. The French star hardly ever leaves the screen during the film’s 106 minutes. It was her unwavering detemination that ensured the film came to be made in the first place. Binoche’s early attempts to bring to the screen Florence Aubenas’s best-selling 2010 book Le Quai de Ouistreham (published in English as The Night Cleaner) met with major resistance from the journalist. But Binoche persisted, as she does, and Aubenas eventually agreed it could be made on the condition that the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature, it’s a case of follow the swordfish. This terrifically atmospheric, almost documentary-like film – Camilleri cites Italian neo-realism, including Visconti’s La Terra Trema, as an influence – tells the story of Jesmark, a real-life Maltese fisherman (Jesmark Scicluna). It also encapsulates a dying culture.His brightly coloured wooden boat, known as a luzzu, with eyes painted on its bow, has been handed down to him through generations, but making a living on this ancient vessel in the bureaucratic modern world is fraught with difficulty. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their terminus, collaging gnomic capitalist critiques holed up in Swiss self-exile, still fiercely repulsing acceptance.Claude Chabrol lasted almost as long making chilly thrillers beloved by the French public but distrusted by the academy, steeped in Lang and Hitchcock, but most of all Georges Simenon. He was similarly prolific and accepting of human Read more ...