Film
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s Cornish cinema, lost boats, drowned men and ways of life wash back in with the tide, nothing truly gone. Where his feature debut Bait (2019) tackled the violence stirred by second-home gentrification in a humiliated fisherman and Enys Men (2022) found elliptical folk-horror in tin mine echoes, Rose of Nevada falls through time in a fishing village which is barely hanging on.The new work is Jenkin’s biggest production by far, but still homemade in mainstream terms. Two name actors, George MacKay and Callum Turner, lead his cast for the first time, fitting happily into his Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”. But not enough for the curators of Multitudes, a multi-disciplinary festival at the Southbank Centre this month, who paired the it with a specially-commissioned animated film by 1927 Studios. Bad idea.I’m not sure any film would enhance the experience of Turangalîla live – how can the music alone not be enough? – but this one positively ruined Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...
James Saynor
We tend to indulge hagiography when it comes to biopics of pop icons. To get the rights to their music, producers often have to let the icons themselves pull the strings. It’s a pact much like the compromises we make all our lives with the music industry – becoming fans of a world riddled with rip-offs, scams and scandals. We’ll only pay to see the film if we’re given the music, as we’re only half-interested in the life.At the same time, stories of addiction and frailty and romantic fiascos, only to be overcome, are carefully laundered into the movie: they serve to bolster the cool of the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The main female characters in Christian Petzold’s films are kindred spirits – sisters in subversiveness. Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on six movies together, from the made-for-TV thriller Something to Remind Me (2001) to Phoenix (2014), the harrowing story of an Auschwitz survivor. Both those films drew on Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (1958). So does his new one, Miroirs No. 3, in which a troubled Berlin piano student walks out of her unhappy ordinary life into a kind of fairy tale. Played by Paula Beer – previously Petzold's muse in Transit (2018), Undine (2020), and Afire (2023) – Read more ...
graham.rickson
French director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961) trained as an interior decorator and illustrator, the move into film a logical progression after working as an actor and designer in Parisian theatre. Emigrating to the US in 1916, he enjoyed a brief but successful Hollywood career before returning home in 1929 as a director ideally qualified to oversee the French film industry’s transition into the sound era.Released in 1943, The Devil’s Hand (La Main du diable) is a lively supernatural thriller, drawing inspiration from the Faust legend and WW Jacobs’s influential short story The Monkey’s Paw. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
“Since when was getting older an honour?” asks Tereza, rightly suspicious when she finds officials nailing up a cheap garland around her front door and presenting her with a medal. This is Brazil, sometime in the near future, and the government has decided that anyone over 75 is an economic burden on younger workers. No matter how fit you still are, you must hand in your work clothes and accept being shipped off to ‘the colony’ on a caged truck dubbed the wrinkle wagon. Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail is a dystopian fable, not dissimilar in its plot and casting to the more sombre Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This entertaining, gorgeous-looking film within a film, directed and written by multi-talented Turkish-Italian Ferzan Özpetek (he’s also directed operas and written several novels), starts in the present day with a large, noisy lunch party. Özpetek plays himself, a director who’s planning a movie, Diamanti, with this company of actresses - a vaginodrome, as one calls it. It’s about the power of women, he tells them. “Is it science-fiction?” asks one, sarcastically. He hands out scripts and everyone reads quietly.Özpetek moved to Rome from Istanbul in 1976 and his meta-film, based on his own Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Nine-year-old-year-old Callie-Rose (the extraordinarily talented Australian actor Lily LaTorre; Run Rabbit Run) needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework. The trouble is, there's no signal because her dad, a reticent cowboy named Dusty (an excellent Josh O’Connor), is living in a trailer on a FEMA campsite, his farm having burned down in wildfires.This quiet, beautiful film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song) with a great score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, is set in southern Colorado. There’s an atmosphere of John Prine-esque melancholy running through it, and indeed one Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Cate Blanchett is not a diva, but a star. Thanks to her boundless versatility and yen for risk-taking, she's at home in arthouse films as she is in Hollywood blockbusters. The greatest secret of her appeal is her elusiveness: she's always fully present and yet strangely ethereal at the same time – whether she's playing a character like Lydia Tár (in Tár) or Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies.Her portrayal of Timothea in Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother feels somewhat different, however. Blanchett has specialized in playing extroverted or strong women, but Timothea is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When Jim Jarmusch won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, it came as something of a surprise. The best film award had been widely expected to go to the emotionally demanding The Voice of Hind Rajab, not to the mannered ensemble piece that is Father Mother Sister Brother. Perhaps the jury, led by Alexander Payne, a fellow American auteur, felt that it was time to honour another veteran indie film-maker, or that it was just too politically fraught to award a docudrama set in Gaza.Either way, the Venice prize cued a cascade of positive reviews from critics, which judging by the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s got a brother who’s a brotha!” exclaims an ecstatic Anna (Halle Bailey; The Little Mermaid; The Colour Purple) to her bestie (Aziza Scott) back in New York. She’s just arrived in Tuscany, where she’s trying to pass herself off as the fiancée of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who she’s only met once, briefly.Matteo has a British-accented cousin, Michael (not his brother, and maybe he’s adopted, but never mind) who’s played by Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton). Cue shirts off in a vineyard, swoon, screams of excitement from the audience.This rom-com, directed by Kat Coiro (Marry Me; Matlock) and Read more ...