Film
Pamela Jahn
Actors who play someone with Tourette syndrome have to take a huge step out of their comfort zone. Robert Aramayo accepted that challenge when he was cast as John Davidson in I Swear. On 30 November, Aramayo's portrayal of Davidson was named 2025's Best Lead performance at the British Independent Film Awards.Davidson is a colourful character, to say the least. Warm and caring, he's also unpredictable, outspoken, and prone to swearing wherever he is. It is one of the most marked characteristics of the condition he's been living with for decades. His Tourette's activism led to Queen Elizabeth Read more ...
theartsdesk
SASKIA BARON1 One Battle After Another2. Sinners3 It was Just an Accident4 Palestine 365 Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight6 April7 Motherboard8 Holy Cow9 The Brutalist10 Pillion It was hard work finding ten films I wholly loved this year, and even then, these have flaws (particularly the last third of The Brutalist). But I’m pleased to find that five of my favourite films were directed by women, each exploring very different genres, and that Sinners and One Battle After Another were such densely visual treats they required repeated viewings. JUSTINE Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“So then I go and I make another cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with raspberry jelly and now I’m going to call Allen Ginsberg at exactly noon. Because he does his meditations and they told me to call him either at 11 at night or after 12.”On 18 December 1974, Peter Hujar photographed Ginsberg for The New York Times, his first commission from the paper. The meeting with Ginsberg – it’s a tough assignment, Ginsberg never warms up and when Hujar develops the film he says there was “no contact there” – is just one part of the day that he describes in minute detail on 19 December to his Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is joy, energy – and no little irony – about the way that Hollywood stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play and sing the parts of a working-class couple from Milwaukee with big dreams and big hair.Song Sung Blue tells the story of a real-life couple, Mike Sardina (1951-2006) and Claire Stengl/Sardina, who formed a Neil Diamond tribute band in the early 1990s and performed in small venues, becoming local celebrities under the name Lightning and Thunder.The plot is about the pair’s desire to fulfill themselves musically. It’s an aspiration that constantly jolts them – and the viewer – Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s 1952 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, seven years after the Enola Gay dropped a bomb on the Japanese empire, but one skinny New Yorker is still waging war against it, armed with street savvy, a motormouth and a traditional table tennis paddle.This is the unlikely subject of Josh Safdie’s first solo directing release, Marty Supreme, loosely based on elements from the life of Marty Reisman (here called Mauser and played by Timothée Chalamet). Most Japanese sportspeople had to observe a post-war travel ban, but not the low-level celebrities of the table tennis world, which was barely Read more ...
howard.male
What is a documentary maker supposed to do when someone as gifted and empathic as Francis Whately has already covered most of the Bowie bases with three detailed and hypnotic films about different defining periods of the man’s life and career? Five Years, Finding Fame and The Last Five Years are texturally complex films that bear repeated viewings. And there’s another Whately film due out next year that will no doubt definitively nail the Berlin years too.Maybe Jonathan Stiasny film should have been called "The Less Raked-Over Years", rather than the more grandiose The Final Act – given that Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The first time you see Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value you want to catch her, hug her, slap her (as her character requests), or do anything to calm her down. Reinsve plays Nora, an actress suffering from horrific stage fright moments before she steps on stage in front of an audience to play the lead in a new play. Nora doesn’t fear failing; she passed that point some time ago. What freaks her out is the risk of losing control over her deepest emotions and being reminded of her vulnerability. The reason for Nora's turmoil is twofold. Her mother recently died, and she has to deal Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fantômas was the creation of French pulp novelists Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, whose titular criminal genius made his first print appearance in 1911. An amoral sadist with a talent for disguise, Fantômas made his first film appearance two years later in a five-episode crime serial directed by Louis Feuillade. Feuillade’s sober, stripped-back adaptation was hugely influential and the template for subsequent attempts to put Fantômas on screen. Until the mid-1960s, that is, when André Hunebelle helmed three brightly coloured Fantômas romps which so enraged co-creator Allain that he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Eugene Jarecki’s forensic investigation concludes that Julian Assange’s character flaws are dwarfed by the high crimes he exposed, and can’t justify the cruel and unusual punishment of his cramped Ecuadorian Embassy sanctuary. This reverses what he sees as self-interested manipulation of the official narrative, which stoked personal condemnation as a smokescreen for state slaughter and surveillance.Character has dominated Assange’s evolving cinema persona, which began with fellow Australian Robert Connolly’s admiring Underground (2012), an account of young Julian the teen hacker in the barely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The third of James Cameron’s world-building epics arrives 16 years after the first one, but only three after number two, Avatar: The Way of Water. Apparently proceedings were held up by Cameron and his army of technicians having to adjust to developments in technology, not least the gadgetry required for underwater performance capture.Anyway here it is, and the results (in 3D) are fairly awesome, not least the running time of three and a quarter hours. We find ourselves back on the planet Pandora, a kind of supernatural paradise where human-like beings and an extraordinary array of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Family crises and relationship breakdowns are familiar subjects for films to tackle. Both are central to Aribam Syam Sharma’s 1990 feature Ishanou (The Chosen One), where divine intervention wreaks havoc on a middle-class family living in India’s remote north-eastern Manipur province. Husband and wife Dhanabir and Tampha (Kangabam Tomba and Anoubam Kiranmala) are celebrating their young daughter’s transition to adulthood by having her ears pierced as part of a Meitei religious ceremony. Tension between the pair is signalled early on when Tampha rebuff’s Dhanabir’s attempts to embrace her. The Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Chinese-American director Bing Liu’s first feature – his Minding the Gap, a wonderful documentary about himself and his skateboarding buddies in Illinois, was Oscar-nominated in 2019 – is based on Atticus Lish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2014 about an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and her relationship with an American soldier who’s done three consecutive tours in Iraq and has severe PTSD.The harsh reality of family abuse and violence in Minding the Gap might lead you to expect something as powerful here, especially as Liu has said that his mother’s immigrant experience mirrors Lish Read more ...