film reviews
I Got Life! review - fresh French comic realism
Saskia Baron

I Got Life!, originally released in France as Aurore, is a lovely, funny low-budget comedy that should definitely appeal to female movie-goers with a fondness for quirky, feisty women d’un certain age. It’s the kind of film that one would probably go to with a girlfriend rather than a male date… even though it would do middle-aged men a world of good to see it.

Fabulous Agnès Jaoui, who also collaborated on the script with director Blandine Lenoir, stars as Aurore, an amicably divorced mother of two adult daughters, living in La Rochelle. She’s going through the menopause with annoying hot flushes and the realisation that she’s become invisible to men, even ones her own age, who seek out younger girlfriends.

The bar she works at has been taken over by a boorish new propriétaire who can’t be bothered to call her by her real name and insists that she is now Samantha and should be confined behind the bar. She needs a new job and a new lover, especially as her older daughter has just announced that she’s expecting a baby and the younger one is besotted with a selfish young oaf and leaving home. Aurore and her gutsy gal pal Mano (Pascale Arbillot, pictured below with Jaoui) aren’t willing to embrace sexless grandmotherly status just yet and they embark on amorous adventures involving old school mates (twinkly Thibault de Montalembert) and strangers. I Got Life!It’s fascinating to see everyday body fascism towards middle-aged women being tackled head on by French filmmakers – France is after all the country famous not only for its flirtatious culture but a nation which performs five times more bariatric surgery operations per year than the UK. It’s lovely too to witness a light-touched fight-back at grotesque stereotypes in a mainstream French comedy. While I Got Life! is not always entirely credible in its plotting – there’s one lucky coincidence too many and a perhaps over-hasty happy ending – this is still a highly enjoyable little gem of a movie.

Nina Simone belts out "I Got Life" on the soundtrack, there’s a cute reference to the William Wellman classic male-female grooming movie A Star is Born and clips of the late feminist anthropologist Françoise Héritier woven in. It’s interesting to compare I Got Life! with the over-engineered movies such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that the British turn out or last year's frenetic Debra Winger vehicle, The Lovers. There’s a freshness and everyday comic realism to I Got Life! which puts those films to shame. It’s not as ambitious a piece of filmmaking stylistically as 20th Century Women which tackled similar themes, but it is warmly recommended.

@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Got Life!

Crowhurst review - plucky indie wins race with rival
Jasper Rees

Perhaps it’s fitting that Donald Crowhurst should once more find himself in a race. Even more aptly, it’s a race against himself. You wait half a century for a biopic about the round-the-world yachtsman who disappeared off the face of the earth, and then two turn up at once. This sort of clash sometimes happens in film, and one movie always ends up trouncing the other. Dangerous Liaisons seduced audiences away from Valmont. Capote killed off Infamous.

The Third Murder review - unpacking a crime enigma
Tom Birchenough

Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu offers up mystery aplenty in his new film The Third Murder, enigma and riddle too. He also moves away from the territory of family drama for which he is best known. There’s similar intensity in some of the relationships between characters here as in his previous work, and it’s engrossingly atmospheric – some visual elements speak as strongly as anything the director has made, while Ludovico Einaudi’s piano/cello-dominated score is almost a player in itself – but even for Kore-eda fans it will surely come as a surprise.

The opening scene of The Third Murder does indeed depict a killing, but the director then spends the next two hours slowly demolishing any sense of certainty we began with about what was actually done, and by whom, let alone why. It isn’t a courtroom drama, though part of the second half does play out in that environment, but rather a legal procedural, overlaid with philosophical elements, and permeated with a sense of life’s strange whimsy that sometimes isn’t far away in feel from the work of Haruki Murakami.

The cycles and variations of parent and child relationships continue 

The central relationship is between confessed murderer Misumi (Koji Yakusho) and his lead lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama, one of Japan’s top singer-songwriters, whose screen career includes Kore-eda’s 2013 Like Father, Like Son), who’s been brought into the case by his senior colleague to try to clarify things. Given the confession, the lawyers’ main preoccupation is to try to avoid the death sentence (which remains in force in Japan): the film’s title, we assume, is explained by the fact that Misumi had previously served 30 years for a double murder, making such a verdict all the more likely. The judge in that earlier case had been Shigemori’s father, prompting some reflection on the ethics of capital punishment (not to mention the human condition), but Kore-eda doesn’t take any strong stand on that issue per se.

Misumi’s position at the opening seems clear, and he has admitted his guilt: having stolen money to fuel a gambling habit, he bludgeoned to death the owner of the small factory where he had been working, and then burnt the body. It’s when he starts to change the details of that story that confusion sets in, prompting in Shigemori a growing engagement that sees him travelling to meet the victim’s wife and daughter (Hirose Suzu is particularly striking as the daughter, pictured below, right), as well as research other aspects of his client’s past. It takes him to some of the remoter regions of Japan, especially Hokkaido in the north – how far it all is from the big city environments that we more often associate with the country – with elements that take us back in time, too.The Third Murder

But the film’s central space remains the prison meeting-room in which the lawyers interview their client; the two sides are separated by a thick transparent screen which allows for strange degrees of close interaction between the two main protagonists when they face each other. In changing his version of events, is Misumi’s memory deceiving him, or is he playing with his lawyer, throwing out diversions from a motivation that may be anything but self-serving? First he uses a press interview to suggest he had committed his crime in collaboration with his victim’s widow as an insurance scam, then hints at much darker elements in that relationship between father and daughter. Kore-eda loosely links that latter element to Shigemori’s own circumstances – he’s divorced, and his relationship with his daughter has clearly been affected by his absorption in his work: the cycles and variations of parent and child relationships continue.

Questions and counter-questions arise as we circle the enigma of what may or may not be the truth. If it all seems something of a game, however macabre, for Misumi, Shigemori’s professional approach is equally ambiguous; as he suggests at one point, “legal strategy is the truth”. We certainly see a lot of legal strategy meetings – some include considerable atmospheric humour in the background – as well as more arcane conferences between judge and the defence and prosecution sides, but on the wider sense of who has the right to judge others, The Third Murder remains silent.  

Visually the film reflects the story's interest in artifice. The widescreen cinematography of Kore-eda regular Takimoto Mikiya is darkly distinctive, especially when charting weather and landscapes. But it’s when he brings us into close-ups on the faces of the two main characters as they confront each other in that prison room that something uncanny happens, as their two images seem to merge in profile reflections in the perspex screen that separates them. It’s one of the most unsettling touches in a film that holds back far more than it reveals.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Third Murder

Unsane review - Claire Foy in bonkers horror satire
Jasper Rees

Steven Soderbergh has always been capable of a big Hollywood moment – Magic Mike, Oceans etc. But much of his filmography consists of curious sideways glances. He’s particularly drawn to the shifting distribution of power between the genders. From sex, lies and videotape to Haywire, by way of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, he has rifled through the genres to find fresh and intriguing stories about men and women. It comes up again in Unsane, a sort of horror comedy satire that makes great use of Claire Foy’s vertical rise to bankability. It also, for the record, features a fun cameo from Soderbergh regular Matt Damon as an adviser of domestic security.

Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, whose very name suggests a split personality. She’s a single young woman who has moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to take up an office job and, seemingly, escape her nagging, needy mother. The new job is no panacea. The clients at the end of the phone test her patience and her boss is soon hitting on her. But deeper anxieties assail her. She hooks up with a hot guy on a dating app and, having promised him sex, thrusts him away in disgust.

Juno Temple in UnsaneDistraught, one lunchbreak she drives over to a hospital to talk to someone about her history of being stalked which, she concedes, has brought on bouts of suicidal ideation. Barely is the session over before she has unwittingly signed a form consenting to her forced hospitalisation. When she objects, agggressively, the period of what feels like incarceration is extended from 24 hours to seven days. The creepily long and empty corridors and impassive white-coated staff inevitably evoke One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Sawyer's fellow patients would all seem to be as psychotic as Violet (Juno Temple, pictured above, very different from her wide-eyed turn in Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel), who occupies the next-door bed. But she forms a bond with Nate (Jay Pharaoh), who counsels her to accept that everyone in Highland Creek Behavioral Center is being milked for their insurance money. When that runs out, they will be released. This would be reassuring if Sawyer hadn’t spotted her stalker from Boston wearing a nurse’s uniform and handing out the daily cups of medication. The nurse (Joshua Leonard, pictured below) insists he’s called George, not David Strine as she claims.

Joshua Leonard in UnsaneThe script by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer has no great truck with plausibility. How David/George could have landed this job and fetched up in Sawyer's life is not examined. The plot flirts with the idea that Strine is a figment of her imagination: is she hallucinating a beard, glasses and a lovelorn gaze onto every threatening male? But gradually scales fall from eyes as Sawyer is slipped her mind-bending medication, offering Soderbergh a chance to work up some woozy visuals (incredibly, he shot the whole thing on an iPhone). Then, after Sawyer summons her mother (Amy Irving) to rescue her, more disturbing things start to happen.

This is a robust breakaway for Foy, who has spent two years rei(g)ning it in as Her Majesty. She’s blonde, brittle and not altogether likeable here, and yet connoisseurs of her Queen Elizabeth will recognise her face’s powerful facility for exuding hurt and offence. She gets plenty of practice at that before the latter part of the film moves into new realms and calls for different colours. Unsane stops being a Kafkaesque satire of Big Pharma and the medical insurance racket, and mutates into a horror riff on the psychosis of delusional male sexuality. Perhaps insurers and stalkers are even cut from the same cloth. It’s all a bit bonkers, though nothing if not timely.

@JasperRees

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Unsane

Mary Magdalene review - potent, feminist revisionism
Nick Hasted

Mary Magdalene’s story hasn’t suddenly become the second greatest ever told, despite its radical expansion here. Garth Davis’s follow-up to Lion is, though, a profoundly thoughtful and convincing telling of the Christian main event.

The Square review - stylish, brilliantly acted satire
Saskia Baron

One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Its cast includes Danish heart-throb Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple). The setting is Stockholm’s fashionable art world so there’s a visual feast of ultra-cool art gallery interiors, gilded halls, luxury apartments, modernist offices and a Tesla slicing through streets familiar from all those Scandi noir series.

This isn’t a thriller, although it is certainly filled with jeopardy, and it isn’t a romance, although it has one of the most startling sex scenes I’ve seen since Toni Erdmann. Instead The Square is a post-modern farce – a string of terrible mishaps befalls museum director Christian (Claes Bang, pictured below) as he tries to hype a new exhibit and we watch his life spiral from cool to chaos. It’s also a satire, gleefully poking fun at the pretensions of the art world and liberal Swedes’ earnest efforts to promote a dialogue on immigration and racism.Claes Bang, The SquareBut most of all, The Square is brilliantly acted and very stylish, if at times just a little bit too pleased with how clever it is. To describe the plot in any detail would be to spoil the film’s unfolding pleasures; suffice to say there is a theft, inept revenge, social and professional humiliation, and an actor impersonating an ape who should make Andy Serkis a tad jealous.

Östlund is following up his disquieting hit Force Majeure and his budget has increased exponentially. For the first time he’s working with actors famous outside Scandinavia. But his directing style hasn’t changed – gruelling improvisations and multiple takes until the performance is just as he wants. Director of photography Frederik Wenzel's elegant shots are held at almost uncomfortable length; the audience is given plenty of time to observe closely each character as their thoughts and feelings flicker in front of our eyes.The SquareThere’s much clever framing too, marginal figures edging into our vision. The spaces Christian navigates are both claustrophobic and hallucinatory. Confusing, faintly disturbing peripheral sounds come from off-screen with no explanatory cut-aways to their source. Dialogue is kept naturalistic and doesn't get in the way of the actors – Aaron Sorkin does not haunt this script.

The noodling a cappella score is a touch irritating in its over-signalling of wit and the child actors lack credibility, but The Square finds Östlund at the top of his game. It should provide the most fun to be had in an art movie this month if not an art gallery (installation pictured above). And Claes Bang's English accent, a homage to David Bowie, is startlingly good. This Danish actor would have no problem squaring up to Bond.

@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Square

Annihilation, Netflix review - not quite a sci-fi masterpiece
Adam Sweeting

Mild controversy hovers over the new film by Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director. Garland’s 2015 directing debut, Ex Machina, was a slow-burning hit which found favour with critics and film festival juries.

My Golden Days review - a mesmerising tale of heartbreak
Owen Richards

Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric).

DVD/Blu-ray: Shiraz
Tom Birchenough

The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.

German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making some of the classic films of the 1920s and 1930s, but never learnt an Indian language – also brings huge scale to its desert exteriors and crowd scenes, with hordes of camels, and a crucial elephant moment. It provided precedent for the Hindi post-war film industry as a whole, but there’s genuine feeling in the more intimate moments, as well as moments of realism that look forward even to the likes of Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy .

ShirazIt all looks more than handsome in this BFI National Archive 4K restoration (there’s a short extra about that process), and the film’s new score from Anoushka Shankar is a treat. It must have been wonderful on the big screen with live ensemble when premiered as the LFF 2017 Archive Gala, but the combination of image and musical accompaniment certainly impresses from disc. Shankar has spoken of combining elements from the film’s 17th century historical setting, its 1920s production era and the present day, with the tastes of the latter dominating. As well as her own sitar – there are transcendent moments that sound so vibrantly alive, and gloriously lyric accompaniment for love scenes – she orchestrates for Indian bamboo flute and percussion elements, amplified at key moments by violin, cello, clarinet and keyboards.       

An early intertitle, “Love, Sorrow - and Fame Immortal”, gives a hint of the action. British scriptwriter WA Burton worked from a treatment of Niranjan Pal’s play about Mumtaz Mahal, consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who commemorated her with Agra's monument to undying love (the Taj Mahal, pictured above). It’s a very free treatment of her life story, beginning with a childhood ambush that sees her brought up by a peasant family, her nobility unsuspected; they name her Selima and treat her as a sister to their son, Shiraz (the film’s producer Himansu Rai plays that role in adulthood, opposite the enchanting Enakshi Rama Rau). Kidnapped by slavers, she arrives in the Emperor’s harem, where the Shah woos her. But Shiraz will always love her: he follows her to the palace, where emotions run freely. His suffering is finally redeemed when, already blind, he enshrines her memory in the Taj Mahal: “not hands but the warmth of a heart built this which stands like a dream.”

The accompanying booklet essays throw fascinating light on the unusual circumstances behind the film, and the context of Indian film-making in the closing decades of the British Raj. Films were aimed simultaneously at the local and international markets (Shiraz was a hit in Europe, but not in the US). Documentary and propaganda was never far away, illustrated by two extras here: Temples of India is a 1938 10-minute travelogue, shot in colour by none other than Jack Cardiff. The 1944 12-minute Musical Instruments of India was a public information film to promote Indian arts and culture, interesting because it didn’t follow more standard wartime lines to emphasise instead the wider cultural achievements of the soon-to-be-independent nation.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Shiraz

Wonder Wheel review - Woody Allen and Kate Winslet channel O'Neill
Jasper Rees

In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons.