Film
Matt Wolf
Amidst the deluge of high-profile year-end releases, it would be a shame if the collective Oscar-bait noise drowned out Ordinary Love, as quietly extraordinary a film as has been seen in some time. Telling of a couple whose marriage is impacted by a cancer diagnosis, this collaboration between the husband-and-wife team of Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa offers a performance for the ages from Lesley Manville, whose career ascendancy in middle age remains a wonder to behold.Liam Neeson, playing Manville’s beloved yet often bewildered husband, isn’t far behind in a portrait of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago. His film (as producer, writer, director and star) is an obvious labour of love, an evocative, entertaining, old-fashioned gumshoe noir, which fits snugly within the traditions of the genre while offering a refreshingly atypical hero.Forget Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes – sharply tailored, fast-talking, ineffably cool. Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a fledgling private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, who can’t help but fire off spontaneous Read more ...
graham.rickson
Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with director Wes Anderson’s familiar tropes. Elaborate sets, artfully designed props and Bill Murray all feature, the usual eccentricities tempered by genuine affection for the film’s young heroes. Anderson’s eighth feature film, released in 2012, is about many things: youthful love, isolated rural life and family dysfunction among them. Bob Balaban’s twinkly Narrator, sporting typically Andersonian attire, sets the scene: we’re on the New England island of New Penzance in 1965, three days before a devastating storm is due to hit.Twelve-year-old Sam Shakusky (a Read more ...
Tom Baily
Writer-director Jennifer Kent knows that Australia’s colonial past shouldn’t be beautified, and she drives that fact home in every gloom-drenched shot of The Nightingale (her second feature after The Babadook from 2014). This is an immensely ambitious film and an unrelenting long haul of suffering that confronts themes of sexual violence and Indigenous dispossession.Set in 1825 during the genocidal British colonial rule in Tasmania, the film follows Irish convict Clare (Aisling Franciosi) who launches a personal revenge mission against the colossally sinister Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin Read more ...
Owen Richards
For an actor, there are few bigger risks than writing and directing your own film. Securing funding is pretty easy if you’re a household name, like Karen Gillan is, but that doesn’t mean your script is any good or your vision holds water. At their worst, these films can be vain and embarrassing affairs. At their best, you’re left wondering if there’s anything their star can’t do. The Party’s Just Beginning puts Gillan very firmly in the latter camp.Set in her hometown of Inverness, Gillan stars as Liusaidh (pronounced Lucy for the non-Gaelic readers), a supermarket cheesemonger haunted by Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Badass” – as applied to dynamic women – and “girl power” may be the kinds of exhausted clichés that are reductive in the #MeToo and Time’s Up era, but the new Charlie’s Angels movie revitalises the attitude they describe in a way that’s neither condescending nor retrogressive. Hunger Games actor Elizabeth Banks’s second feature as a director, and the first she’s written, is a pleasurably larky action rollercoaster that makes the most of its lowballed feminism. The three crime-busting warriors this time work for the European branch of the LA-based Charles Townsend Detective Agency. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The world’s most successful mystery writer is found dead on the morning after his 85th birthday. In attendance in his Gothic pile are his bickering family, each of whom might wish him dead, and a colourful detective ready to determine whodunnit. We’ve been here before, of course. The good news is that writer/director Rian Johnson’s homage to the Agatha Christie style murder mystery is no dutiful but dull period carbon copy, but a gloriously entertaining, modern-day riff. Poirot and Miss Marple were never as much fun as this. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Where to start with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort? Begin with director Jacques Demy’s technical brilliance: the opening minutes are eye-popping, and even feature a transporter bridge. Teesiders, take note. La La Land's beginning is nifty, but Demy got there first. Then watch the camera swoop up from the main square after the “Arrivée des camionneurs”, straight through an open window and into the ballet studio run by the Garnier sisters. Demy features Rochefort as an uncredited extra, production designer Bernard Evein even repainting much of the town centre. The streets and shutters Read more ...
Tom Baily
A documentary about celebration, fellowship, and the comforting afterglow of cherished memories. What better way to spend a cold late-Autumn evening? Such is the effect of this charming, low-key investigation into the story of Scotch. Rich with personal stories, The Amber Light studies whisky via social history: how and why the golden dram has brought people together.Water, barley, yeast, a boiler and a barrel. Most of us know the basics of how whisky is made (the film devotes about 30 seconds to reminding us), but how and why did it originate? Director Adam Park teams with writer Dave Broom Read more ...
Graham Fuller
John Huston’s film of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a conundrum.Despite below-par blue screen work, it’s a fantastic achievement in terms of re-creating the unequal combat of Captain Ahab's Crew vs. Great White Sperm Whale, especially the three-day chase with which the author, anticipating The French Connection and Jaws, brought his literary behemoth to a climax. Did they really not have CGI in 1956?Gregory Peck’s Ahab is much better than the star himself thought: it has a Shakespearian resonance that suggests Peck wasn’t going to be outdone by Orson Welles (whose Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A defining chapter in American history is all but sold down river in Harriet, director Kasi Lemmons' tubthumpingly banal film about the extraordinary bravery and courage of the American freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman. Telling the same story more expansively chronicled several decades ago in a Cicely Tyson-led American mini-series, Harriet casts the diminutive yet mighty English actress Cynthia Erivo in the title role without seeming to know quite how to use her. In context, it comes as a relief when a performer who shot to fame (and won a Tony) on Broadway in The Color Purple gets to belt Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic yet underdeveloped dramatic roles. A sweet and naïve girl, she’s driven mad by Hamlet’s wavering affections and her father’s death. She was often the subject of paintings, yet rarely of novels until the 21st century. Ophelia, starring Daisy Ridley, is an adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 book of the same name, and does a valiant job at not only filling in the blanks but bringing some flair of its own.Ophelia is a precocious child of the Danish court, handpicked by Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts, pictured below right) to join her ladies-in-waiting. She Read more ...