Film
Matt Wolf
It's not easy witnessing your own death. But that's the situation in which we find the lyricist Lorenz Hart at the start of Blue Moon, Richard Linklater's startling film about a creative maverick who is well aware that his own shining star is on the wane. Boasting longtime Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke in his finest screen performance since this same director's Boyhood, the movie casts an unsparing glance at a great talent run amok even as it offers Hawke a renewed shot at the Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Hawke's last nomination, in fact, was for Boyhood 11 years ago.) Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In 2016, Julia Ducournau arrived with a bang in the film world with her sensual coming-of-age cannibal horror drama Raw. She then took the top prize at Cannes five years later with her second feature, Titane, which featured a woman having sex with a Cadillac. It seems a fair question, then: "Where do you go from here?" The French director and screenwriter smiles and hesitates for a moment before she admits that Alpha, her latest exploration of body horror, might not be the follow up film everyone was expecting but is clearly her most personal work yet.It's a family drama infused with the Read more ...
Justine Elias
It's hard to criticise a movie that opens with a shot of an Allied G.I. spitting and urinating on a Nazi insignia, but that moment of smug satisfaction (Nazi punks must die!) is fleeting. Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, has more on its mind than self-congratulation.
Drawing on Jack El-Hai's book "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" and other biographies and autobiographies, Nuremberg focuses on the complex prosecution of Hitler's second in command, Herman Goering, and 21 other top Nazi officials.
Where its esteemed predecessor, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
He wouldn't teach English, Toby Jones says. But drama? "Maybe," he pauses, "drama in the widest possible sense of the word, because it is an ever-expanding field, I suppose."
It's certainly an exciting playground for the Hammersmith-born character actor, who since the early '90s has elevated dozens of movies and TV films and series. In 2023, Jones became a national treasure starring in Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the ITV drama about former subpostmaster Alan Bates's relentless campaign for justice in the notorious class-action suit.
In Mr. Burton, set in Port Talbot in 1942, Jones Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Million Dollar Baby and Fight Girl, before women could compete in boxing at the Olympic Games, there was Christy Salters Martin. The hard-punching West Virginian known in the ring as the Coal Miner's Daughter and to U.S. television audiences as a sassy sports phenomenon was a housewife who just happened to knock people out.
Dressed in baby pink for the ring and floral, puffy-sleeved dresses for her many TV chat show appearances, Martin embodied all the contradictions of the ‘90s and early 2000s’ view of female athletes. "I’m not trying to make a statement about women in boxing Read more ...
James Saynor
Given that the film industry is a fairly vain business, it follows that every movie is to some extent a vanity project. So it seems churlish to describe this new Daniel Day-Lewis picture, which he co-wrote with his son, Ronan, for Ronan to direct and himself to star in, as other than a welcome return for the superman actor.
It’s eight years since Day-Lewis père was last seen on the screen (in Phantom Thread), or frankly seen anywhere else, and here the celebrated recluse plays an inland Robinson Crusoe coming to terms with the sins of the past. The film appears to be set about 20 years ago Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ash (Riz Ahmed) is one of cinema’s capable men, the kind of monastically devoted pro made to be a hitman or getaway driver. David Fincher’s The Killer parodied the type with Michael Fassbender’s system-driven assassin, and from The Day of the Jackal to Drive, such men live or die by their method.
Ash’s gig is, though, intriguingly odd: he helps corporate whistleblowers with cold feet safely return evidence to employers, communicating via the Relay phone system for deaf callers, who type messages then spoken by operators, an old-school set-up firewalling him from detection. Ash is also versed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.
The Gaza War meant director Annemarie Jacir filmed under duress, with her original West Bank village set overrun by Jewish settlers and Jordan standing in, before a defiant return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The war impacted Jacir in subtler ways, emotionally entailing a straightforward film shorn of levity or experiment. The result is a low-budget equivalent to David Lean, less interested in Lawrence of Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Kelly Reichardt has a thing about losers. You often see them in her films. It's the failure of American individualism that concerns her.Even when she tells stories of her country's history, like in the anti-western Meek's Cutoff (2010) or the 2019 Old West drama First Cow, her focus is always on marginal characters – sometimes homeless (Wendy and Lucy), sometimes betrayed by casual infidelity (Certain Women) – that are never romanticised, but presented with all their faults and quirks. Reichardt's new film, The Mastermind, is again about an outsider, but this time there's a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wendy and Lucy is a road movie with a protagonist who’s unable to move on, and a study of friendship where one half of the partnership is mostly absent from the screen. Originally released during the 2008 financial crisis, Kelly Reichardt’s third feature film is ripe for reissue, its depiction of life on society’s margins more relevant than ever.We’re not told what events have prompted the central character to up sticks from her Indiana home and head north-west with her beloved dog Lucy. As played by Michelle Williams, Wendy is an unconventional runaway. She’s conventionally dressed, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The clatter of cool jazz on the soundtrack announces writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s latest project, the kind of score that back in the day would have announced a film by a maverick new talent. The film, her ninth, has been given a faded and vintage look, tricked out in shades of greige and tan that you see in ageing photos of the 1970s, as if it too was shot then.The setting is leafy Framingham, Massachusetts; the date some time at the start of the 1970s. But it’s a film about the American Sixties as much as anything, a turbulent era that has left a legacy of war, draft-dodging and growing Read more ...
James Saynor
There’s something about hauntingly performed songs written in the first person that can draw us in like nothing else. As songs from Robert Johnson to Leonard Cohen remind us, they can take us into the mental recesses of their subjects – for instance, malcontents and killers – better even than a novel or a movie. We’re kidnapped by the voice.Bruce Springsteen seemed to insist on this more than anyone with his rough and unready 1982 album Nebraska – an echoing prairie lament for lost sanity – and ended up kidnapping himself, to judge by this new biopic that painstakingly traces Read more ...