Film
Graham Fuller
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to emulate.When Carey's character Cheyenne Harry is looking confidingly at the camera, his surly almost-smile is millimetre-perfect in its grudgingness and sense of the ironic. His unsteadiness and glazed expression when drunk convey that bizarre mix of hyper-selfawareness and dimmed comprehension everyone knows when they've had two or three too many. In Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Helen McCrory – who has died at the age of 52 – was the next in line, and she was destined to be as great for as long.Even in her late twenties, when she was barely known, she was already and obviously different. She had a face that seemed prematurely mature and wise. She didn’t look like anyone else, nor sound it. Her voice was a husky instrument that moved between Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After winning a couple of Baftas, and with five nominations at next week’s Oscars, Promising Young Woman comes surging in on the crest of a wave. Emerald Fennell, already known for acting roles in The Crown and Call the Midwife and for showrunning series two of Killing Eve, hits it out of the park here as writer and first-time director, and she’s the first British female to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. She’s brilliantly supported by Carey Mulligan’s sizzling lead performance.Promising Young Woman isn’t easy to pigeonhole, but that’s part of its tantalising allure. It’s by turns a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On first sight, Citizen Lane's appeal may seem limited to those with an Irish connection or an interest in fine art. But director Thaddeus O'Sullivan turns what could have been a dry documentary into a witty and fine-looking docudrama about Hugh Lane, a turn-of-the-century art dealer and philanthropist.O'Sullivan utilises talking heads and historical recreation to tell Hugh Lane's rather remarkable story through Mark O’Halloran’s witty script. Lane was part of Ireland's Anglo ascendency – not aristocratic, but landed and monied all the same. Born in County Cork in 1875 and educated in England Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
On the 30th floor of a Tokyo apartment building, a charming little boy brushes his teeth, watched over by his smiling mother who sings to him gently. He’s full of joy - today his dad’s coming with them on the walk to nursery school. The little family of three walk out together. All seems well – too well - in their comfortable, quiet world.Prolific Japanese director Naomi Kawase, a Cannes favourite (this is her 32nd film), brings her trademark views of dazzling sunlight seen through trees, sparkling waves lapping and languorous shots of faces to bear in True Mothers, though the story, adapted Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The term most often used about Berlin director Angela Schanelec’s filmmaking seems to be “elliptical”, and her latest film, I Was at Home, But..., which won the Best Director award at Berlinale 2019, is no exception. Approaching it is like an associative process – you absorb elusive hints, as much from visual elements as from any suggestion of story, trying to gradually assemble something, almost like creating a mosaic. Except that Schanelec determinedly avoids endorsing any final picture: links are left open, and narrative, such as it is, is very much secondary to mood.And the mood of I Read more ...
Tom Baily
Since launching his directing career in 2011 with The Showdown, Park Hoon-jung has established himself as a promising devotee of the bloody gangster genre. The pandemic may have slowed the South Korean director’s momentum, as the producers were forced to release the film belatedly on Netflix. Still, the move could provide an auspicious entry into the American market.The lonesome lead is Tae-gu (Eom Tae-goo), a lowly member of a notorious Seoul gang who is eager to up his rank. His cockiness is concerning to his sister, who worries that he may be killed. Tae-gu shrugs off the warnings. Soon Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Catch Us If You Can, the 1965 road movie starring Barbara Ferris and the eponymous drummer and guiding force of the Dave Clark Five, proved a more trenchant satire of capitalism in the embryonic Swinging ‘60s than did the box-office smash it was piggybacking, the previous year’s A Hard Day’s Night.John Boorman’s feature debut was as inventively directed as Richard Lester’s Beatles vehicle, but it couldn’t hope to be as iconic or as financially successful. Instead of the Fab Four at their wittiest and most anarchically Goons-ish, it had Clark playing Steve, a dour, cynical stuntman who Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year-old at the slowly awakening heart of Sequin in a Blue Room, a 2019 Australian film only now reaching the UK. The graduation project of its New Zealand-born director and co-writer Samuel Van Grinsven, the 80-minute movie charts a mostly compelling path from multiply meaningless gay hook-ups through to something at least resembling a connection, if the image of shared popcorn at the end offers any indication of happier times ahead. Structured across a series of apartments that count down from ten to zero, the screenplay (co-written with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I once went to see Motorhead, back in the days when real men didn’t wear earplugs, and afterwards it was if somebody had completely sawn off the top half of my hearing register. Weird and scary, and the band were putting themselves through that every night.Darius Marder’s absorbing and ingenious Sound of Metal takes as his subject a thrash-metal drummer who suffers near-total hearing loss, and is suddenly faced with having to re-evaluate his life, his career and the central relationship with his bandmate, Lou. Marder pitches us head first into a stage performance by Lou and drummer Ruben ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. It seems, at first glance, a dismayingly insubstantial work for the maker of such discomfiting German cultural and political critiques as Yella (2007), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), but nothing could be further from the truth. Undine (Paula Beer) is an apparently self-sufficient Berlin freelance historian in her mid-twenties who lectures on the city's Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged.Always distinctive, the cinema of the small Caucasian nation of Georgia has usually been distinguished by its vivid local colour, but there’s nothing like that here: though it’s set in the director’s homeland – Read more ...