In the most unlikely of places, there is one of the world’s most prolific directors. He has produced over 110 films, he’s mobbed wherever he goes, and he inspired people through the darkest of civil wars; yet outside of Afghanistan, no-one knows the name of Salim Shaheen, the self-proclaimed "Prince of Nothingwood".
film reviews
Nick Hasted
There are many obvious Hollywood responses to someone losing their legs in the Boston Marathon bombing. Director David Gordon Green waits his whole film to make one. His subject Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal) possessed too little bullshit, and too much muddled angst, and had too much to drink to behave the way a crassly patriotic public which included his mum expected. He refused to be “Boston strong”.
Adam Sweeting
Like a bizarro-world echo of Lenny Abrahamson’s Academy-titillating Room, Dave McCary’s endearing indie feature takes a potentially hideous tale of abduction and control and transforms it using the amazing healing powers of fantasy and creativity.
Saskia Baron
On paper this film sounds so worthy: a widowed Orthodox Jewish father struggles to convince the Hassidic community elders that he can raise his young son alone after the death of his wife. But it’s the opposite of worthy on screen – Menashe is utterly absorbing, deeply charming, and very funny. It’s an impressive first narrative feature by documentarian Joshua Z Weinstein, who brings an assured intimacy to the screen from the outset.
The film opens with a long-lens shot of Hassidic men walking on a city street; from their outfits and demeanour they could still be in pre-war Poland, but for the brick phones in their hands.The camera picks out one figure to follow, Menashe (Menashe Lustig), a flat-footed scruff in shirtsleeves who works in a kosher grocery store. His boss is pretty unscrupulous but Menashe’s a decent bloke who warns customers off dodgy goods and banters with his Colombian co-workers. Recently widowed, Menashe’s main concern is persuading the community elders that he is capable of looking after his young son Rieven (Ruben Nivorski, pictured below). Menashe doesn’t want to be married off hastily by a matchmaker, but that might be the only way to prevent Rieven being adopted by his disapproving and snobbish brother-in-law.
Filmed in Borough Park, an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn, it’s to Weinstein and his producer Danny Finkleman’s enormous credit that they managed to win enough trust from the local Hasidic community to be allowed extensive access to the streets, restaurants and apartments of this closed world. Ultra-Orthodox leaders don’t allow devout followers to go to the cinema or have TV or the Internet at home; there is a great distrust of all modern media. Cast entirely from non-actors, the script was developed from Menashe Lustig’s own life story – he really is a widowed grocer with a young son – although it leaves out his sideline as a comedian who makes Youtube videos.
Menashe keeps messing up at work and in his family life. He's disorganised and scatty and while he wants to stay within his religious community he can’t accept all their rigid restrictions. He loves his son and is frustrated by his own inability to win him back to his tiny apartment and away from his wealthy relatives. Lustig plays the loveable schlemiel superbly and is well matched with characters from the neighbourhood, some of whom had apparently never seen a film, which must have made directing them challenging. Performed almost entirely in Yiddish, the dialogue was originally written in English by Weinstein and his co-writers Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed (surely the only time a Muslim has scripted a Yiddish film). One of the film's many charms is that it respects its audience’s intelligence; there’s no outsider character to act as mediator, and we’re simply immersed in Menashe’s world.
Weinstein has made a remarkable film which not only takes us inside a fascinating closed world without editorialising, but he's also given us a portrayal of a father and son’s bond which could stand alongside that neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves. Beautifully shot by former photojournalist Yoni Brook, Menashe is enhanced by the subtle use of naturalistic sound and a sparse but highly effective original score. This is a small but perfect gem of a film.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Menashe
Sarah Kent
Soaring over an expanse of blue sea, a white bird traverses the screen diagonally. Gliding unhindered through the air, it is the embodiment of freedom; by contrast, the movement of people down below is constrained by border crossings and passport controls. The perfect tranquility of this opening shot is the calm before the storm; prepare to spend the next two hours witnessing extremes of human misery and, by turns, feeling horrified, angry and deeply depressed.
Matt Wolf
No movie that folds Toby Jones of all people into a Gallic entourage headed by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the two as formidable as one might wish, is going to be without interest.
David Kettle
It’s shameful to admit it, but it’s perhaps rather surprising that a film about a fashion photographer and designer should end up being so profoundly moving and inspiring.
Matt Wolf
Genuine emotion does battle with gerrymandered feeling in Wonder, which at least proves that the young star of Room, Jacob Tremblay, is no one-film wonder himself. Playing a pre-teen Brooklynite who yearns to be seen as more than the facial disfigurement that announces him to the world, Tremblay is astonishing once more in a movie that feels as if it wants to break free of the formulaic but can't quite bring itself to do so.
Markie Robson-Scott
Jasper Rees
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.
Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that implausible decade of wooden rackets, big hair and (ahem) unequal pay. The story is basically true: female champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) led a protest walk-out from a tournament circuit which offered much greater rewards to male players, set up a breakaway women’s tour, only to face a phallocratic broadside from left field when fiftysomething former pro Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) started challenging the top women to a gender-themed play-off.
Riggs had a clown's genius for garish marketing and happily cast himself as male chauvinist pig in order to boost ticket sales. His showdown with King in a Texan jumbo-dome became a famous event which, in retrospect, looks like a sideshow with a slight absence of oomph. So to beef up the script Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) tells the parallel story of King’s discovery of her lesbianism and clandestine affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels as the tour hairdresser.
Thus King is fighting a public battle but, because she’s married, she’s also involved in a private one. She's not the only one with marital troubles. Riggs is a compulsive hustler who sacrifices his own family life, and a comfortable marriage to his heiress wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue, who gets a tender speech in which she gives him the boot). In this telling what matters to Riggs is the buzz of chasing preposterous bets on court, taking on all-comers while tethered to dogs or goats or wearing flippers.
It’s a role which Carell inhabits with relentless gusto (although his racket play is atrocious). As King, the ever-adorable Emma Stone wears the wire-rimmed glasses and apes the loping walk, and convinces as a steely feminist with a vulnerable core. Her swing’s not bad either (though the big match is CGI’d to the hilt). Riseborough is lovely as a free spirit whose gaydar, in an intimately soft-focus salon scene, tells her Billie Jean is there for the taking.
The facts of the Billie Jean story have been fairly outrageously origamied out of shape, events dragged around, people placed where they weren’t. King’s Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) comes off very badly as a hatchet-faced queer-basher. This being a feelgood fist-pumping version of a complicated narrative, the ugly aftermath of King's love affair doesn’t make it into the what-happened-next blurbs. Instead Marilyn hastens to Billie Jean’s changing room before the big game to fix her hair, the way these things happen only in the movies.
If you accept that you’re being sold a simplified snapshot, Battle of the Sexes is a lot of fun. It has two directors – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who made Little Miss Sunshine) – perhaps to prove that, somewhere on this project, the sexes really can collaborate as equals. Of course it's a necessarily rigged story from which no man emerges with much credit. It's hard to give two hoots for Riggs's private anguish. Billie Jean's walk-on husband Larry King (Austin Stowell) is a lantern-jawed dope. Tennis impresario Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) may as well horns and a curly tail. Even foppish tennis couturier Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming, not quite the full ticket as an English toff) spouts feeble bullet-pointed bromides - “some day we will be free to be who we are” etc.
There’s an awful image of fellow pro Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales, terrific) talking to camera with a tall patronising commentator clamping his hand round the back of her neck as if she’s his chattel. And spot the briefest cameo for that famous Athena poster of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt to reveal nothing underneath. The bare-faced cheek of male chauvinism needed a damn good slap. This fantasy history administers it lightly, with wit and grace.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Battle of the Sexes