Film
graham.rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This heartfelt documentary follows twin girls who are just starting primary school. We first meet Amber struggling to pop her head through her shirt, helped by her sister Olivia. Amber has Down Syndrome and everything is just that bit harder for her; not just dressing, but understanding what cake her dad wants when they’re playing with her toy grocery shop. Olivia, who provides fragments of voice-over in an otherwise narration-free film, worries that other girls at school are mean and tease her sister. Her filmmaker father, Ian Davies, reassures Olivia from behind the camera that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for several Academy Awards. David, played by wonderful seven-year-old newcomer Alan Kim, has a heart problem that causes his parents, especially his mother Monica (Yeri Han) to worry about him constantly.They have plenty of other worries too. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun; Sorry to Bother You, Burning, Okja, The Walking Dead) has brought his family from South Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a MacGuffin of $250,000 in wartime bullion she doesn’t know she owns, was also a 1963 encore for Grant’s Fifties Hitchcock thrillers (sans Hitchcock), combining To Catch a Thief’s breezy French locations with North by Northwest’s innocent on the run. Released just after JFK’s assassination (requiring the word’s overdubbing with “elimination”, since Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1967, Viy (Вий) was the first horror film to be produced in the USSR. Based on a novella by Gogol that draws from a multitude of folkloric tropes, Viy is more disquieting than chilling, though several sequences still unnerve. Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov are credited as directors, but screenwriter and art director Aleksandr Ptushko was the film’s guiding spirit. Underappreciated in the West, Ptushko was a pioneer in the field of stop-motion animation; start looking for examples of his work on YouTube and you’ll see some astounding clips. Think of him as a Soviet-era Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something of an anomaly in Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s debut feature between its fast-moving dramatic opening, defined by an agile hand-held camera, and the much slower, more static scenes that follow. That early material, charting the moment when recurring domestic abuse finally pushes a wife to break from her violent husband, has an impressive immediacy that seems largely dissipated when, about a third of the way into this two-hour film, Gutierrez’s focus moves into the protracted courtroom procedure that, as its title suggests, comes to dominate Verdict.That Read more ...
Tom Baily
Like the sun-happy LA of this film’s setting, there’s a hard-to-pinpoint sham quality to Wander Darkly. It feels like too much phoney dialogue crept in to the final script of this “serious” film by writer-director Tara Miele. Sienna Miller is a formidable centrepiece in the drama about a couple forced to review their relationship history after a car crash. But she is held down by a story that feels like it was clipped together in a rush.Adrienne (Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are in an unmarried relationship with a young child, and they’re struggling. Adrienne is in and out of creative jobs Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There aren't many unforgettable moments in The Columnist, but one occurs when the eponymous Dutch journalist Femke Boot (Katja Herbers) clambers from the skylight of her house and, unseen by her middle-aged neighbour (Rein Hofman), who's doing DIY on his roof, tips him to his death on his patio. It's the offhandedness of the murder that's impressive – it recalls the young thug blithely tipping the bound woman into a lake in both versions of Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997/2007). This first revenge slaying of a misogynist internet troll by Femke precedes others that turn her into an Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Cassandra and her sister – or perhaps they’re friends or lovers – seem extraordinarily in tune. Like choreographed dancers, they move precisely in unison, down to tripping over their scarves at the same moment or flopping drunkenly into bed together while a cell phone buzzes beside them unanswered, on and on into the night.Slowly, however, it becomes apparent that actually there’s only one Cass and, flipping the idea of actors playing their own twins on its head, she’s played by two women: Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who co-wrote and co-starred in their acclaimed original two-hander play Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho II director Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and Elisabeth Shue zoology student Jane, unwisely offering help at his remote Gothic mansion, where the most developed ape, Link, is his besuited butler and begrudging factotum.There’s something of The Island of Dr Moreau in Phillips’ arrogant, eventually overthrown genetic tyranny. “He’s missed the bus by a lousy 1%!” he rails at the apes’ shortfall Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Her glory years as the muse of Josef von Sternberg long gone, Marlene Dietrich had been labelled “box-office poison” and was sulking on the French Riviera when the producer Joe Pasternak summoned her back to Hollywood to star opposite James Stewart in George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (1939). The tragicomic Western would prove the best of the films Dietrich made at Universal. Of the four comprising this BFI Blu-ray set, Seven Sinners (1940) is tropical nonsense, The Flame of New Orleans (1941) is a frou-frou delight, The Spoilers (1942) is a well-paced Western, and Pittsburgh ( Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Hot on the heels of her 2019 triumph Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s fifth feature continues a perfect track record; this is yet another gorgeous and perceptive film, told from a determinedly female perspective but with a wisdom that is all-embracing. Having started her career with films about children (Water Lilies, Tomboy), before moving to teenagers (Girlhood) and then adults (Portrait), Sciamma now takes on three generations at once – a girl, her mother and grandmother – to consider the threads of memory, personality and time that connect them. Her approach is Read more ...