Film
Graham Fuller
The archetypal fascinating male in Jane Campion’s films – whether his allure for a woman owes to his earthy virility or emotional sensitivity, his animal appeal or his soul – has a malign other.That’s true of The Piano (1993), In the Cut (2003) and Bright Star (2009), though in the latter movie’s then atypical triangle, it’s the poet John Keats whom his friend Charles Brown seeks to possess and control, at least intellectually – not Keats’s beloved, Fanny Brawne.Brown's obsessive admiration for the poet anticipated the restrained homoerotic boy-crush that comes to dominate Campion’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Though sexual hypocrisy in modern-day Romania is the ostensible target of Bad Lack Banging or Loony Porn – a satirical drama that enfolds a scattershot polemic – Radu Jude’s tenth film is broadly concerned with the nation’s all-enveloping post-Communist malaise. Nationalism, fascism, militarism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and capitalism are all grist for the mill in this withering provocation.It begins with a thirtysomething married couple’s enthusiastically acted hardcore home-made sex tape. Emi (Katia Pascariu), the wife, wears a leopard-print mask and a pink wig and performs fellatio on her Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In an era when toxic masculinity has become a clichéd accusation to throw at any portrait of men behaving macho, it’s fascinating to revisit Dennis Hopper’s 1980 movie Out of the Blue.Years before his performance as the sinister Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Hopper created Don Barnes, a truck driver with an extremely unhealthy relationship with his daughter and wife. After ploughing his rig into the school bus, Don does five years in jail. Daughter Cebe (Linda Manz) is left in the same small town and goes to the same school as the victims while her waitress mother Kathy (Sharon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based fairly closely on Sally Wainwright’s 2009 ITV series Unforgiven, The Unforgivable replaces the former’s star Suranne Jones with Sandra Bullock and has airlifted the action from Yorkshire to Seattle. A beefy supporting cast including Jon Bernthal, Vincent D’Onofrio and Viola Davis sprinkles on a modicum of box office glitter, while director Nora Fingscheidt has successfully evoked a menacing atmosphere of star-crossed characters battling a malignant fate.Despite all this, it can’t quite live up to its potential. The problem is Bullock, stoically persevering with the character of Ruth Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Back in 2013, Gina Gershon chewed up the scenery in the daytime movie House of Versace. Focusing on the murder of Gianni Versace, it was a tacky, cheap drama that knew what it was, and was all the more entertaining for it. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott’s new drama which focuses on an equally prestigious Italian fashion house and a murder. The film masquerades as a crime drama with an impressive gloss, but it can’t mask its daytime TV mechanics. Scott’s second film in as many months, House of Gucci follows box office failure The Last Duel. Sitting somewhere between bad opera and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Why Les Triplettes de Belleville was rechristened Belleville Rendevous in the UK is one of several questions left unanswered by this reissue. Along with what happened to French director Sylvain Chomet’s animation career, which seems to have fizzled out after his 2010 Jacques Tati adaptation The Illusionist.The latter, while beautiful to look at, lacks bite, but 2003’s Belleville Rendevous is a masterpiece, one of the 21st century's greatest animated features. Tati’s influence is discernible throughout this near-silent film, and Chomet’s idiosyncratic use of sound will amuse anyone who’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the first 35 minutes of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s three-hour Drive My Car, which the Japanese director adapted with Oe Takamasa from a story in Murakami Haruku’s Men Without Women collection, the successful actor Kafuku Yūsuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi) endures experiences that would derail a less stoical man.One is the sight of his screenwriter wife, Oto (Kirishima Reika), having sex with a handsome young actor, Takatsuki (Okada Masaki), in their apartment. Mr Kafuku doesn’t react, but walks away and never mentions Oto’s infidelity to her.That Oto loves her husband is evidenced by the compassion she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to know if this biopic of Richard Williams – father of Venus Williams and Serena Williams, two of the greatest tennis players ever (perhaps the greatest in the latter's case) – is true to the facts, or just a version of them.The women are listed as executive producers, so it was with a cynical reporter's eye and someone who has a little knowledge of the subject (I've interviewed Richard Williams several times over the years, and attended numerous press conferences given by his daughters), that I watched King Richard. It's an enjoyable appreciation of his role in their success Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found a way to sustain a career in Hollywood long after the age when the industry likes to throw its leading women on the scrapheap.She plays Jackie Justice, a successful MMA fighter (that’s Mixed Martial Arts, otherwise known as cage fighting) whose career has disastrously stalled as her personal life has fallen apart. We meet her while she’s living in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The fourth feature made by writer-director partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is not as celebrated as the six consecutive masterworks with which they followed it. It’s nonetheless a remarkably atmospheric film that outlined the shape of things to come.It was inspired by the sacrifice of five farmworkers of the hamlet of Greup (near Oud Beijerland in South Holland), who were executed by the Germans on 19 September 1941 for attempting to spirit away the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber downed by flak. The six British airmen became POWs.Since this Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the dishes or change the sheets (stained sheets are of particular importance here).Which is why young Berkshire squire and future lawyer Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) is alone in the imposing family house, his parents having gone out to a lunch at a hotel in Henley, and why Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young; Shirley), an orphaned maid at a neighbouring Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous, Rockwell suspects, of his close friendship with Quentin Tarantino. The intervening years haven’t been fallow, but Rockwell’s 10th feature, the lyrical childhood mini-odyssey Sweet Thing (2020), represents a major comeback.Rockwell's revival began with 2013’s hour-long Little Feet, made for $11,000 and starring his kids Lana (b. 2003) and Nico Read more ...