Film
Markie Robson-Scott
Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.Swarms of stripy insects, however, are far from the most severe problems besetting the new hipster residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green luxury lofts. These were formerly a crime-ridden high-rise public housing project, as pictured in the 1992 film, now partly torn down and in the midst of gentrification.“White people built the ghetto, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Budget constraints. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can be a blessing in disguise, forcing creativity from simplicity. That’s exactly what works for The Toll, a dark comedy set in the wild west of these isles: Pembrokeshire.Michael Smiley plays a nameless toll booth operator in the middle of a large coastal wasteland. What the booth is for isn’t clear – there’s plenty of room to drive around it. But there’s a heavy implication that doing so would put you on the wrong side of the mild-mannered operator, and the locals know better than that.There’s a taste of the spaghetti western to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s often the company one keeps that makes a journey worthwhile, not the destination. That’s as true for the five ebullient Fort William schoolgirls making their first trip to Edinburgh in Our Ladies as it is for the film’s audience. These Highland hoydens are so much fun, it’s a pity when our brief time with them ends.Choir members at a Catholic all-girls’ school, they descend on Edinburgh, after some unnecessarily beautiful shots of braes and glens, with high hopes of getting laid and zero interest in winning the singing competition the choir’s been enrolled in by its optimistic organiser Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Nest is a peculiar animal, hard to nail down, parts family drama and social satire, but with a creepy sense of suspense rippling under the surface that threatens to bust the plot wide open. The fact that it’s written and directed by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Southcliffe) makes sense of the unease. But at the film's heart is an old-fashioned marital tussle, between an independent, no-nonsense American woman and her posturing, bullshitting, over-striving English husband, each performed with nuance and gusto by Carrie Coon and Jude Law. You could cut the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Written and directed by Lisa Joy, who masterminded HBO’s Westworld TV series, Reminiscence is a grandiose sci-fi blockbuster that looks great, sounds deafening, but ultimately disappoints because it’s a genre-sampler that can’t find a distinctive voice of its own. A powerful cast, notably the trio of Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson and Thandiwe (formerly Thandie) Newton, do their best, but their hands have been tied by echoes of Casablanca, Waterworld, The Big Sleep, Chinatown and probably many more.Joy is emphatically in the Nolan camp (she’s married to Jonathan, co-creator of Westworld and Read more ...
mark.kidel
The shadow of the Holocaust and the horror of the camps haunts literature and the cinema: from The Reader to The Night Porter, from Schindler’s List to Son of Saul. For some, the subject was beyond authentic representation – and perhaps only a poetic masterpiece such as Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, with its sombre and recurring images could come close to making the violence and tragedy in some way true.Sydney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, which tells the story of a camp survivor whose wife and children were murdered by the Nazis, manages the challenge through the very intense performance of the lead Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s always a bit worrying when distributors choose to open a film in August at the best of times, but after 18 months of covid playing havoc with release schedules, the backlog of titles has to be dealt with somehow. The Courier is one such movie, seeping out now in selected art house cinemas: if it doesn’t set the box office on fire, the distributors can blame the sunshine, not the drabness of the movie itself. This tale of Cold War skulduggery, based on a true story, has been waiting for a UK release since before 2020 and provoked mixed reviews on its American release in March. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When CODA opened Sundance in May, it was an instant hit with that liberal, kindly audience and was snapped up by Disney at great expense. It’s easy to see why – CODA is a funny, easy-to-watch coming of age comedy that allows viewers to feel warm and understanding towards Deaf people. It’s got Oscar nominations written all over it. But I’m curious to see what the Deaf community make of the film. Certainly its American producers have dodged the attacks that the original French version La Famille Bélier received back in 2014 when speaking actors were cast in the roles of Deaf Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s much to enjoy in Running Against the Wind: Jan Philipp Weyl’s contemporary Ethiopian epic is a visual treat, with excellent performances from its two young leads. And how often do we get to see a film in Amharic with English subtitles?We first encounter Abdi and Solomon (played first by Ashenafi Nigusu and Mikias Wolde) as children playing in their remote village. Abdi has a talent for running, while Solomon is intrigued by visiting western aid worker Tino’s digital camera. He takes the boys on a two-day trip to Addis Ababa, where Abdi is enraptured by a glimpse of the Berlin Marathon Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A lot has changed in the 40 years since Blow Out was first released. In 1981, American critics from Pauline Kael to Roger Ebert praised to the heavens Brian De Palma’s homage to assorted Hitchcock thrillers and his script’s mash-up of 1970s conspiracies. Certainly this handsomely restored print does justice to Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography. Not since Vertigo has a hotel bedroom been so artfully saturated in sickly red neon and ghastly green.But in 2021, what’s also striking is De Palma’s inability to film an actress without wanting to strip her or stick her with a knife. It’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A young film director writes a script based on his father’s life story and invites his dad to play the part. It’s an interesting gambit, given that the son, Jorge Thielen Armand left Venezuela with his mother at the age of 15 and has not returned since. His father stayed behind, so their relationship has stalled. Can it be reignited?Mo Scarpelli’s documentary follows Armand’s attempts to make the film and, in the process, rebuild his relationship with his father. Jorge Roque Thielen agrees to play himself despite not having seen the script; but the project is fraught with difficulty since, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s hard to imagine a movie more of its time than Zola, as it takes on sex, race, the glamorisation of porn and the allure of the ever-online world. For 90 minutes we are embedded in the lives of two young American sex workers and it’s a wild ride that leaves its audience breathless as they try to keep up with the hand-brake turns and sudden changes of pace and tone. Is it another feminist comedy reminding us that it’s every woman’s right to deploy her body any way they want? Or is it a nightmarish true portrait of the sex trade? Or is it a film about the covert racism that comes into play Read more ...