Film Reviews
Lost in FranceWednesday, 22 February 2017
Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Read more... |
Hidden FiguresSaturday, 18 February 2017
Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in... Read more... |
MoonlightFriday, 17 February 2017
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks... Read more... |
The Great WallFriday, 17 February 2017
The Great Wall is David Icke’s worst nightmare. David Icke (if you weren’t there in the 1980s) was a BBC snooker presenter. After ingesting a brain-rotting anti-elixir, he transmogrified into a doolally conspiracy theorist in a turquoise shell suit. He had a showpiece theory about lizards. Lizards – “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids,” he specified – were hiding in underground bases and were “a force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity”. Read more... |
The FounderWednesday, 15 February 2017
Last year we had Jennifer Lawrence as the queen of the QVC shopping channel in Joy. For 2017, here’s Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, a struggling travelling salesman who went on to become the driving force behind the McDonald's fast-food empire. I’m looking forward to seeing George Clooney as Colonel Sanders. Read more... |
CasablancaTuesday, 14 February 2017
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco. Read more... |
LoveTrueSaturday, 11 February 2017
What’s love all about anyway? That’s the almost certainly unanswerable question that Israeli-American director Alma Har’el sets out to tackle in her strange, feverish, at times downright hallucinatory documentary LoveTrue. The problem is, by the end of its alternately entertaining and disconcerting 80 minutes, you’ll almost certainly be none the wiser. And you may even have forgotten... Read more... |
FencesThursday, 09 February 2017
Fences is one of the best-known works by playwright August Wilson, part of his Century Cycle of plays exploring 100 years of black American history, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987. Wilson died in 2005, but further gongs greeted the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, including Tonys for its stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Read more... |
Taxi DriverTuesday, 07 February 2017
Travis Bickle’s Manhattan is long gone, and except for those nostalgic for its grindhouses and their exploitation fare, few surely regret its passing. It’s been years since any modern-day Travis could cruise in a yellow taxi along the erstwhile “Deuce” - the squalid stretch of porn emporia and strip clubs on West 42nd Street - turn north up Eighth Avenue to the high forties and accurately observe, “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers,... Read more... |
Toni ErdmannFriday, 03 February 2017
There aren't many films that at (nearly) three hours in length leave you wanting more. But such is the hypnotic grip cast by Maren Ade's Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann that its final image seems as much the prelude to something as a closing note on what has come before. Read more... |
LovingThursday, 02 February 2017
Loving is not just a love story, it’s also the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple from Virginia who got married in 1958. Richard was white, Mildred was not, and because interracial marriage was banned in Virginia, they were both arrested under the anti-miscegenation laws. Read more... |
GoldTuesday, 31 January 2017
Matthew McConaughey has already had a go at hunting for gold (on film, at any rate) in 2008's Fool's Gold, where he and Kate Hudson were on the trail of a sunken Spanish galleon full of treasure. Critics were unsympathetic ("excruciatingly lame" was a fairly typical response). Read more... |
ChristineSaturday, 28 January 2017
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten. Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida... Read more... |
Hacksaw RidgeThursday, 26 January 2017
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila. Read more... |
DenialThursday, 26 January 2017
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. ... Read more... |
T2 TrainspottingFriday, 20 January 2017
"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
theartsdesk Q&A: director Leonardo Van Dijl discusses hi...
"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose pyschologiical drama Julie Keeps Quiet has...
Dealer's Choice, Donmar Warehouse review - fresh take o...
Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but...
Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Stratford - Messina FC scores o...
Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic....
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters....
DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine as Light
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary...
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Wigmore Hall review...
I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’...
Simon Boccanegra, Opera North review - ‘dramatic staging’ pr...
Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as...
Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...
Album: Car Seat Headrest - The Scholars
Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock...