Film
The Marching Band review - what's the French for 'Brassed Off'?Thursday, 15 May 2025
In Emmanuel Courcol’s drama The Marching Band (En Fanfare in French, and also released as My Brother's Band), a struggling community band in a mining town in northern French has fallen on hard times. Elements of déjà vu, perhaps?Certainly, if... Read more... |
Riefenstahl review - fascinating fascism? Portrait of the Nazis' favourite film-makerFriday, 09 May 2025
There used to be an unwritten rule among BBC commissioners about how long an interval had to pass before greenlighting a new documentary on a familiar subject – Shakespeare, Ancient Egypt, Andy Warhol – they all came round again with a decent... Read more... |
Magic Farm review - numpties from the NinetiesSaturday, 17 May 2025
There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to... Read more... |
Good One review - a life lesson in the wild with her dad and his palFriday, 16 May 2025
Good One is a generation-and-gender gap drama that mostly unfolds during a weekend hiking and camping trip in the Catskills Forest Preserve in upstate New York. A putative indie classic, writer-director India Donaldson’s psychologically acute... Read more... |
E.1027 - Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea review - dull docu-fiction take on the designer-architectFriday, 16 May 2025
It’s hard to say who is going to enjoy E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Admirers of the modernist designer-architect will be frustrated by how little of her other work is actually visible on screen while fans of feminist biopics might... Read more... |
The Last Musician of Auschwitz review - a haunting testamentTuesday, 13 May 2025
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Slade in FlameMonday, 12 May 2025
Over the years Slade in Flame has been hailed as one of the greatest rock movies (albeit rarely seen or screened), up there with Perfomance and That’ll Be The Day.Like those films, it has grittiness running through it like barbed wire through a... Read more... |
The Surfer review - Nicolas Cage is relentlessly down and out in western AustraliaFriday, 09 May 2025
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the menacing motto (sounds more scary with an Australian accent) of the tanned, muscular denizens of Luna Bay beach. But the unnamed hero known as The Surfer, played by Nicolas Cage, isn’t listening.The Surfer... Read more... |
Desire: The Carl Craig Story review - a worthy, brand-conscious encomium for a techno starFriday, 09 May 2025
Carl Craig (b.1969) is a leading Detroit electronic music producer and DJ whose Planet E Communications label has existed for over three decades. This 90-minute documentary, which was directed by Jean-Cosme Delaloye and features over thirty... Read more... |
Words of War review - portrait of a doomed truth-seeker in Putin's RussiaThursday, 08 May 2025
The reporting of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 – on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, a deranged gift from his loyal security services – is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a full... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Gary Oldman on playing John Cheever in 'Parthenope' and beating the boozeThursday, 08 May 2025
Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of real-life personae such as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Herman J Mankiewicz in Mank. He now... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Laurel & Hardy - The Silent Years (1928)Tuesday, 06 May 2025
Eureka’s second volume of Laurel and Hardy shorts catches the pair in 1928 on the cusp of their successful transition to the sound era, two of the 10 films originally released with synchronised sound effects and music.This works especially well in... Read more... |
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