Film
The Beanie Bubble review - an under-stuffed, misshapen product sagaSaturday, 29 July 2023
Another week, another toy story, in the wake of Barbie. And another origin-of-hit-product story, too, after Air. The Beanie Bubble, though, has none of the surprisingly gripping appeal of Nike’s rise and rise via a single trainer design, nor the (... Read more... |
Talk to Me review - teens tempt fate in Aussie alienation allegorySaturday, 29 July 2023
Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover.In Talk to Me, the new horror movie directed by twins Danny and Michael Philippou... Read more... |
Everybody Loves Jeanne review - charmingly weird romantic comedyWednesday, 26 July 2023
Céline Devaux, known for her award-winning short films, wrote, directed and drew the animations for her charming, funny debut feature, which takes the concept of the critical inner voice and runs with it.Blanche Gardin is brilliant as Jeanne, whose... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Thamp̄ (The Circus Tent)Tuesday, 25 July 2023
There are scores of films set in and around circuses. Aravindan Govindan’s bewitching Thamp̄ (The Circus Tent) isn’t like any of them, though I was fleetingly reminded of Jacques Tati’s largely plotless Jour de fête – which also opens and closes... Read more... |
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock review - a sly primerSunday, 23 July 2023
Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used... Read more... |
Oppenheimer review - epic and enthralling study of 'the father of the atomic bomb'Thursday, 20 July 2023
With a track record that includes Memento, Dunkirk, Insomnia and Inception, Christopher Nolan is not a filmmaker who could be accused of a lack of ambition, but even by his standards Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement. Its three-hour running... Read more... |
Barbie review - uneasy blend of farce and feminismWednesday, 19 July 2023
The prologue to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie augurs well. A gaggle of young girls in a rocky desert are playing with doll-babies while enacting the mind-numbing drudgery of the early 20th century housewife. Then a new godhead arrives, a giant pretty blonde... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Twilight (Szürkület)Tuesday, 18 July 2023
Early editions of Swiss novelist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1958 novel The Pledge carried the subtitle “Requiem for the Detective Novel”, the writer’s point being that murder cases can take years to solve (if at all) and that those doing the... Read more... |
A Kind of Kidnapping review - claustrophobic class-division satireSaturday, 15 July 2023
A Kind of Kidnapping is a low-budget British comedy with a neat premise and satirical view of class and politics in the midst of a cost of living crisis.A young couple struggling to make ends meet and facing eviction from their squalid flat come up... Read more... |
Medusa review - stylish, smart, seriously strange Brazilian satireSaturday, 15 July 2023
“There are sex maniacs out there, sodomites, murderers, suicidal people, and communists on the loose! I vote for a curfew!” This fabulous explosion of anxiety, from a teenage girl who we’ve seen beat other young women to a pulp for no good... Read more... |
Isabelle Huppert and director Jean-Paul Salomé: 'Cinema is about a little trade, a little business'Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Isabelle Huppert is French cinema’s icon of icy transgression, from Bertrand Blier’s outrageous Les Valseuses (1974) to Paul Verhhoeven’s Elle (2017), in which her character Michéle denies rape’s trauma, instead seeking out her rapist for... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Inland EmpireTuesday, 11 July 2023
Searching for a coherent narrative thread in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is probably futile, so it’s best to begin with the movie’s nervy central performance by Laura Dern in multiple, overlapping roles as “a woman in trouble”... Read more... |
