Film
Demetrios Matheou
We ought to be sated with the Royal Family right now – on screen, given the riches of The Crown, and in general, what with the persistent, annoying buzz emitted by Harry and Meghan, or the odour of Andrew. So, it’s testimony to the enduring fascination with Princess Diana and the wonderful, singular filmmaking of Pablo Larraín that there’s room for more.Spencer is an extraordinary film, daring in its conception, strange and captivating in its execution, and with a performance by Kristen Stewart that feels, quite literally, out of this world. We’re used to Brits personifying American Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ann Turner’s 1989 feature debut Celia is one of the great coming-of-age films, an enthralling tale of pre-pubescent angst set against a backdrop of post-war Australian social and political history.Contemporary distributors did not know how to promote it; the first British publicity poster suggested a crude exploitation film, and US distributors crassly renamed it Celia – Child of Terror. In Victoria, Australia in 1957, nine-year-old Celia Carmichael is first seen discovering her beloved grandmother dead in her bed; she later endures a visceral nightmare where a scaly creature tries to enter Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Take a bitter-sweet homage to Swinging Sixties London, then add a psychological horror story, and a murder mystery, with a dash of Mean Girls and a commentary on misogyny and sexual violence, all told through the prism of a young woman’s gift for seeing the dead. Edgar Wright has apparently been thinking about Last Night in Soho for more than a decade, which may explain why the final film feels so very over-cooked. Wright is a creative, effervescent, engaging filmmaker. It would be impossible for him to make a film that isn’t entertaining, and this latest venture Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
As a teenager in 1967, I asked for a Mary Quant make-up box for Christmas and my parents reluctantly complied. It was so thrilling to hold that plastic white box with the black daisy in the middle and the big mirror in the lid and to be able, at last, to experiment endlessly with the eye-shadows, the pearly face-lighter, the Starkers foundation (“Forget about colouring, go for shaping” said the instructions, excitingly).I already had her white zip-front PVC mac with a black collar and cuffs, bought from Fenwick or Selfridges, slightly too long but easy to chop off at the hem, and, like Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry, newcomer Zofia Stafiej excels as sullen Polish schoolgirl Ora, who resentfully travels to Dublin to collect the body of her estranged father, Krzysztof, who has been killed on the unsafe waterfront site where he’d been hired as an emigrant construction worker. Since there’s no insurance money forthcoming to cover the cost of transporting the coffin, Ora fears she’ll have to use the money her dad said he was saving to buy her a car, supposing he was telling the truth.This is Ora's worst-case scenario and partially explains her truculence. Any grief she feels Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’d venture that Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic is an almost perfect adaptation. It’s difficult to imagine the novel being better visualised, or its characters better cast; at the same time, the director’s own sensibility is very much in evidence – we can feel Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival in Dune’s DNA. The result is a great coming together of source and adaptor, an awesome, breathtaking epic.And Dune is a daunting monster to adapt (that’s just the first volume), as proven by the visionary David Lynch’s honourable, but Read more ...
mark.kidel
One of those films weighed down by a considerable reputation, La Dolce Vita (1960) is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. From the very first sequence in which a figure of Christ sails across Rome’s skies, suspended from a helicopter, a sensational image that summed up the spiritual bankruptcy of the time, until the last when an innocent and beautiful girl smiles quizically in close-up, this is a deeply moral film.On one level this satirical depiction of the “sweet life” consists of a series of wild parties, hosted and attended by the city’s beau monde, but it also a film about the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Todd Haynes’ documentary about the Velvet Underground has to be one of the better uses of time by a film-maker during the Covid pandemic. He spent lockdown putting the film together with a team of archivists and editors working remotely. It’s a beautifully shot and ingeniously collaged portrait of the decadent New York band which weaves together an extraordinary wealth of archive footage and some choice and apposite interviews. Unlike recent music documentaries which have had a tendency to corral extraneous talking heads singing the praises of their subjects a little too loudly (The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mariya Saakyan’s 2006 debut feature is bookended by grainy footage of what looks like a fire-ravaged diary, the distressed, crumbling scraps of paper torn and charred. The missing pages and unfinished sentences spill over into what follows, Saakyan inviting viewers to fill in the gaps in this haunting, elegiac film.Mayak (translated as The Lighthouse), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman returning to her war-torn homeland in the early 1990s, attempting to persuade her elderly grandparents to come with her back to Moscow. Saakyan described Mayak as “a personal story”, Read more ...
Gabriela Montero, Kings Place review - improvising to a Chaplin classic is the icing on a zesty cake
David Nice
As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously. The passengers on the ship taking them to a new life are brutally cordoned by the crew; enter the same fierce bass-register tritones which made us jump out of our seats as Gabriela Montero began her recital with Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, then a whiff of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, and later, as our hero finds himself dollarless in a New York restaurant, echoes of the other Second Sonata in the programme. Prokofiev and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to all intents and purposes, like a home movie about her former life in Copenhagen. More than 20 years on, Vinterberg did it again with Another Round, a black comedy about four high-school teachers navigating their mid-life crises by drinking their way through routine lessons and boring family suppers. The result was an Oscar-winning masterpiece Read more ...