What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen.
film reviews
Nick Hasted
Ash (Riz Ahmed) is one of cinema’s capable men, the kind of monastically devoted pro made to be a hitman or getaway driver. David Fincher’s The Killer parodied the type with Michael Fassbender’s system-driven assassin, and from The Day of the Jackal to Drive, such men live or die by their method.
Nick Hasted
“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.
Adam Sweeting
Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on the book by Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love is an unsettling dive into the disturbed psyche of Grace, played with mercurial brilliance by Jennifer Lawrence. Grace is a new mother still struggling to get accustomed to the demands of her baby, and with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson), she has moved into the house that belonged to Jackson’s dead uncle, out in the remote backwoods of Montana.
Markie Robson-Scott
“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).
Helen Hawkins
The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.
James Saynor
There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.
Justine Elias
Another day, another shooting: this is Florida, USA, where the "Stand Your Ground" self-defence law allows people to use lethal force when they perceive a threat to their lives. The idea may be shocking to Britons, but such laws have become prevalent in America, even though they may be providing cover for straight-up murder.
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro strains every sinew to bring his dream film to life, steeping it in religious symbolism and the history of art, cannily restitching Mary Shelley’s narrative and aiming grandly high. He can’t sustain Frankenstein’s heartbeat over two-and-a-half hours which try to justify a lifetime’s devotion to the subject. There are, though, marvellous passages where the ages of reason and magic meet.
Helen Hawkins
No Other Choice