Film
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 ...
Saskia Baron
There was always something a little diffident about teenage Marion Elliott-Said, who created her on-stage persona Poly Styrene after putting together her band X-Ray Spex from a small ad in the back pages of the NME in 1977. Male fans and the music press wanted her to be a punky sex kitten thrashing around on stage, but she was always more thoughtful in her lyrics, which touched on slavery, gender stereotypes, genetic engineering and our limitless hunger for shiny plastic goods.Born in ‘57 and raised on a council estate in South London by her English mother, she didn’t see much of her Somalian Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eddie Murphy – one of the biggest stars of the 1980s – has taken his time in making a sequel to the enormously successful Coming to America, which was released in 1988. In that film, directed by John Landis, Murphy played another of his cheeky, quick-talking and knowing comedy roles; as Akeem, a prince from the fictional African nation of Zamunda.It was an amusing fish-out-of-water, culture-clash comedy, as Akeem escaped an arranged marriage and, with his best friend Semmi (Arsenio Hall), fled to Queens, where he fell in love with Lisa (Shari Headley), who loved him for himself and not his Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can a film be both too long and too short? If so, Into the Darkness definitely fits the bill. Anders Refn’s long-nurtured family epic follows Karl Skov (Jesper Christensen, more famous as a Bond villain), a self-made Danish industrialist who struggles with his conscience when his country surrenders to Germany in 1940. Should Skov refuse to manufacture the goods required by his new masters and risk losing not only his comfortable home but also deprive his loyal workers of their livelihood too? And what choices should his sons and daughter make about who they consort Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Romanian director Radu Jude invariably serves spicy satire that challenges his compatriots to face historical crimes and present failings. The latest is an erudite and daft, raunchy and knockabout, endlessly provocative film that, for sake of brevity, we’ll call Loony Porn.The film has not only been made during the pandemic but fulsomely features the life of a city outdoors – namely Bucharest – as its citizens routinely engaged in social distancing, face covering and the rest. Accompanied by a plot that touches on parenting, the worse aspects of social media and cancel culture, the result Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A teen comedy with a thematic difference, Moxie has enough memorable moments to firmly establish comedian Amy Poehler as a director worth reckoning with in what is her second film, following Wine Country in 2019. Telling of the teenage Vivian's coming-of-age as a rebel against the landscape of #MeToo, the Netflix movie goes enough of the way towards transforming this genre's familiar tropes that one only wishes it had enough, well, moxie to go still further. There's undeniable pleasure to be had from the collective awakening that transforms the female student body of Rockport High in a Read more ...