Film
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 ...
James Saynor
Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.We’re still waiting for the first great haunted-chatbot movie, but in the meantime this tidy Canadian chiller offers a bit of a throwback, courtesy of a possessed podcast. A woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying in her mother’s dowdy antique home to nurse this comatose Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
James McAvoy’s directing debut has a plot that’s so implausible, it would probably be laughed out of pitch meetings. But the story is essentially true, as recounted in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “Based on a true lie”, the opening credits announce.This mad storyline’s two protagonists really were ridiculed when they took time out of their call centre jobs and boarded a bus from Arbroath to London for a record label’s open auditions, only to be dismissed as “rapping Proclaimers”. Their authenticity and nationality derided, they decided to prank the “Scottishist” music industry Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
François Ozon has typically filtered his version of Albert Camus's existential novella The Stranger through his cool, ironic sensibility, the film's fluidity recalling at times the raw poetry of Fellini's and Pasolini's early work. Set in the French Algeria of the 1930s, it follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) as he visits his mother’s funeral, meets his old lover Marie (Rebecca Marder) on a beach, and gets drawn into the domestic melodrama of his violent neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault's sudden ruthless murder of an Arab turns the stark drama into an absurd judicial farce. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. An opening swoop towards London’s gleaming high-rise skyline ends at the building site where a Luftwaffe bomb is unearthed, snub nose shark-like in the soil. Initially disorienting, parallel tales follow. Police Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Read more ...