Film
Nick Hasted
Ti West’s slyly self-referential horror film about a Texan porn shoot subverts expectations. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre/Debbie Does Dallas genre mash-up promised by the premise, pumping out head-spinning sex and gore, is in fact a muted exercise in craft, with memorable ideas on desire.From the moment blonde Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) steps out of the Bayou Burlesque club beneath a mural of an alligator snapping at a bikini bottom, and the camera pans to the industrial estates and belching refineries behind this particular American dream, West wittily depicts sex as small-town escape and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A speeding drunk driver arrows down a silent street into a Roman block of flats. The impact’s reverberations ripple through the next 10 years, in Nanni Moretti’s soulful, Italian all-star adaptation of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Three Floors Up.The teenage driver, Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti), sent a woman fatally careening on his disastrous course, confirming the low opinion of his judge dad (Moretti), while barely phasing sympathetic mum Dora (Margherita Buy). The smashed flat’s owners, Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti), are more concerned by incipiently senile old neighbour Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I would suggest watching River on the largest possible screen, so you can bask in the breathtaking beauty of the visuals. Directed by the Australian Jennifer Peedom, who won awards for Mountain and Sherpa, the documentary celebrates the magnificence of rivers and reminds us that we are utterly dependent on water for our survival. “Humans have long loved rivers,” says narrator Willem Dafoe but, he asks, “as we have learned to harness their power, have we also forgotten to revere them?”The answer, of course, is “yes” and the film reveals our propensity for treating rivers merely as resources – Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Having established his world-class reputation with gritty crime thrillers, notably A Prophet, Jacques Audiard is clearly on a mission to branch out: after his terrific, revisionist western The Sisters Brothers, comes this ambling, sexy, millennial story about love, friendship, and the complicated areas in between. It doesn’t electrify as his very best, but is thoroughly appealing and made with the Frenchman’s usual combination of empathy and precision.The film is loosely based on a trio of graphic short stories by the American Adrian Tomie. While this may explain the film’s episodic Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Patricia Highsmith must be spinning in her grave. This ridiculously incompetent adaptation of her 1957 crime novel lacks all suspense or credibility. It’s hard to believe that Adrian Lyne, responsible for huge box-office hits like the provocative thriller Fatal Attraction and the dodgy but watchable 9 ½ Weeks and Indecent Proposal, could make something quite so feeble as Deep Water.The movie was originally intended for a cinema release, but COVID-19 provided the perfect excuse for shuffling it out for streaming in the hope that its stars would draw an audience at home. Deep Water Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“No one can say you didn’t try,” shipyard worker Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is told, shortly before bluffing his way aged 46 into the 1976 British Open, having never played golf before. The British love of the underdog is our popular cinema’s most appealing trait, valuing dreamers and chancers over power and glory, and the real life Maurice certainly fits the bill. Rylance makes him slow-talking but not quite slow-witted, a sometimes wry, sometimes naïve holy fool, eccentric but always moral; his speech patterns seem to calmly navigate constant unseen obstacles, much like his stoically Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the air echoes with wars and rumours of wars, Hive has the potential to strike a chord resonating way beyond its Kosovan setting. The factually-based story is set in the aftermath of the Balkan conflicts of the late 1990s, after Serbian forces had carved a trail of rape, murder and destruction through Kosovo’s Albanian communities.Written and directed by Kosovo-born Blerta Basholli, Hive looks at how a group of women returned to their devastated village of Krusha and set about salvaging some kind of life from the wreckage. Most of their husbands had been rounded up and “disappeared” by the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
How do you make a film about death, love and loss that avoids being sentimental, maudlin or pretentious? Take your cue from Portuguese artist Catarina Vasconcelos.Her debut feature, The Metamorphosis of Birds unfolds as a series of exquisite vignettes. Each frame is a masterpiece composed with the beauty and exactitude of a Dutch still life. Meanwhile, on voice over, we are treated to a poetic meditation on grief.In close-up, we see her grandfather Henrique (José Manuel Mendes) telling his dead wife Beatriz that he has sold the house and moved to an old people’s home. He needs to set himself Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1962, František Vláčil’s The Devil’s Trap (Ďáblova past) is the first in a loose trilogy of historical epics, the second instalment of which (Marketa Lazarová) is often cited as among the greatest of all Czech films.Shorter and sparer than its successor, The Devil’s Trap is no less enthralling, Vláčil’s visual style and unusual use of sound fully evident. Based on a novel by Alfréd Technik and set in rural Bohemia during the 17th century, the film follows Probus the priest (Miroslav Machácek, pictured below), charged by Cestmír Randa’s Regent with investigating Spálený ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No actor had a classier time of it in the Eighties than William Hurt, who has died at the age of 71. Ramrod tall, blue-eyed and aquiline, with a high forehead swept clear of thin fair hair, he was a brash decade's intelligent male lead. Those years in the sun began promptly in 1980 with Altered States, continued with the steamy noir thriller Body Heat (1981), then steered him into ensemble comedy in The Big Chill and Soviet sleuthing in Gorky Park (both 1983). Hurt won an Oscar for the prison drama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). Broadcast News (1987) and The Accidental Tourist (1988) Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The relative runt of the Godfather litter was hacked out in a Las Vegas casino, as Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo worked up scenarios for an assignment taken on for the money. Coppola the inveterate cinematic gambler, crippled by the dashing of his indie mogul dream with Zoetrope Studios, could no longer refuse Paramount’s sequel offer. Now that he’s reframing this renamed, subtle yet radical re-edit of The Godfather Part III as “a summing up, almost an illumination of what the first two films mean”, its ignoble, desperately hot-housed origin should be remembered. Much feels forced, as Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A story of forbidden love, Great Freedom takes place almost entirely in a prison. The film's background is encapsulated in the word “175er/ hundertfünfundsiebziger”, still to be found in German dictionaries and collective memories as a pejorative word for a gay man.It's a reference to Clause 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised homosexuality. The law was originally introduced in 1871, broadened by the Nazis in 1935, substantially re-drawn in 1969, but only finally and fully repealed in 1994. There is also topicality here: claims for reparations – which are generally Read more ...