Interviews
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
Justine Elias
There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.More recently, in the hands of writer-director Mark Gatiss (pictured below), the series has been mining dread from the work of authors less well known for horror: Arthur Conan Doyle, for last year’s Lot 249, and Edith Nesbit (author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It) for this year’s tale, which is based on Man-Size in Marble. In the new adaptation, titled Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly apocalyptic crisis. Farcically human, they pocket hors d’oeuvres, flirt and pull rank, lose tempers and trousers. Meanwhile red flames lick the sky, a HAL-like sex chatbot commandeers comms, and the excavation of “bog men” - primeval leaders castrated, bound and buried by disgruntled constituents - serves as ominous warning of their power’s precarity Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Payal Kapadia’s lyrical fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light, which received the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, is now accruing end-of-year prizes. This week, the New York Film Critics Circle and the voters for the Gotham Awards (which honours independent movies) named it 2024’s Best International Film. More prizes will follow.All We Imagine as Light, which features dazzling night scenes, blends fiction and documentary. Opening on a near-vérité travelling sequence through the busy Dadar market in Mumbai, Kapadia’s birthplace, it swiftly broadens into the story of three women hospital Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How old were you when you first had an image of the Arctic? When you first had that image, what was it that most resonated? Was it its remoteness, the endless snow and ice, the polar bears? Did it seem like a mythical place of mirages and monsters? Or was it a place you thought you might travel to or even work one day?For young readers of the beguiling, illustrated books by fast rising children’s author Chloe Savage, there’s a chance to encounter the Arctic both as a place of magic and as a fascinating scientific proposition. In The Search for the Giant Arctic Jellyfish – which won the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roy Haynes, who had begun to seem immortal, has died aged 99. In this extensive Arts Desk interview from 2011, one of the greatest jazz drummers ranges across his remarkable life with sharp intelligence and generous feeling.The man who played with everyone, Roy Haynes earned his Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Grammys, in a career even his 86 years hardly make credible. He was 21 when he got the call to drum for Louis Armstrong in 1946. He was at the drum stool as Billie Holiday played her last club gig, crying at the pain of her dying body. Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.Set in Mexico and originally to be filmed there, but made eventually (with virtual Mexican backdrops) in a studio near Paris, Emilia Pérez has a telenova plot, features song and dance numbers, is Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore. It was first used to describe a crop of horror films released in 2014, including Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walk Home Alone at Night, but it has also been used to describe some of the most recognisable horror films of the decade by directors like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and Ari Aster. To some this is an innocent enough Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The high level of entries for this year’s Leeds Piano Competition – 366, almost twice the number who entered in 2018 – is just one reminder that any young pianist wanting to make their name today is negotiating shark-infested waters. Technical excellence is a given – if you want to make a living, you need to have something extra to win the support of concert halls and critics.When I first see the 25-year-old Lithuanian Ignas Maknickas (the ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ts’) in St James Park, he doesn’t look as if he’s suffering too badly from the pressure – he’s tapping idly on his phone while surveying Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic uses bomb-ravaged Vienna as an index of the aftermath of World War Two. It’s a city divided between the Allies and the Russians, stranded in a murky limbo between the old pre-war Europe and the divided continent that’s painfully starting to take shape. It’s a city of secrets, lies and shadows – and very haunting Expressionist-style shadows they are Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Dalia Stasevska is a persuasive advocate for new music, as presented on her new album Dalia’s Mixtape. She combines a puppyish enthusiasm with a salesman’s eloquence – beneath which sits a steely self-confidence in her own artistic vision. The Mixtape is a collaboration between Stasevska, the BBC Symphony Orchestra (of which she is Principal Guest Conductor) and Platoon, an artist-led label that is part of the Apple Music family. I visited their studios in north London last week to speak to Dalia about the project and what it means to her.Dalia’s Mixtape (reviewed below by Graham Rickson) Read more ...