Film
Joseph Walsh
Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien follows the same formula of many literary biopics, with a tick-box plot of loves, friendships and hardships that forged the writing career of one the 20th Century’s greatest fantasy writers.We open at the Western Front, as a feverish Tolkien doggedly makes his way through the trenches with trusty companion, Sam (Craig Roberts) – a proto-Samwise Gamgee, complete with West Country accent - looking for his schoolfriend, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle). Blasts of German flame-throwers transform into dragons, and caped cavalry officers shape-shift into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a romcom of two radically different halves, vaulting so dizzyingly from insultingly unbearable to daringly hilarious that walking in half-way through becomes a viable option.It begins as a grim case study of the patriarchal odd couple, as schlubby gonzo journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) becomes the unlikely speechwriter then unbelievable lover of immaculate presidential hopeful Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron). Hollywood’s touching interest in improving nature’s stacked odds against such coupling noticeably dims when the genders are reversed.The flat cinematography, jolly synth Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Khrustalyov, My Car! comes, infamously, from the words uttered by NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria as he departed the scene of Stalin’s death in March 1953, and Alexei German’s film comes as close as cinema can to dissecting the surreal terror of those times, indeed of the Soviet era itself. It's the work of an extreme auteur at the height of his unpredictable powers, shot over the course of some five years in the mid-1990s, the official interference that had dogged German's Soviet-era films a thing of the past. Its hallucinatory power looks as striking as ever in this Arrow Academy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The latest from the prolific Sergei Loznitsa, Donbass is a bad-dream journey into the conflict that’s been waging in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, barely noticed beyond its immediate region. The titular break-away region, also known as “Novorossiya” (New Russia), is under control of Kremlin-backed militias, fighting the Ukrainian army commanded by Kyiv. But Loznitsa – the director was born in Belarus, raised in Ukraine, and studied film in Moscow, a personal history that surely gives him a perspective on both sides – has not made a war film as such: rather Donbass offers a series of vignettes Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Mediterranean’s massacres of the refugee innocent come uncomfortably close to a lone female sailor in this stark parable of European helplessness and indifference.When German doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff) casts off from Gibraltar, the ocean’s vastness seems a challenging backdrop for a testing voyage. For a while in Wolfgang Fischer’s austerely beautiful film, she is silent and peacefully alone, relishing her freedom. When a storm rolls in, and her ship repeatedly slips into the trench between waves with her at the helm, Robert Redford’s lonely stoicism as the sailor of a sinking ship in Read more ...
graham.rickson
This Blu-ray reissue brings sci-fi masterpiece Ikarie XB 1 back to its original visual glory, with the 1963 film presented here in the 4K restoration first shown at the Cannes festival in 2016 (distributor Second Run had previously released an earlier restoration on DVD in 2013). Just how good the film looks in its latest incarnation can be observed when it's compared to the title and closing sequences recut for the film’s English language dub that are included as bonus features. Both are distinctly dim and scratchy, though worth watching to see what happens at the very close, Czech Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Earth’s mightiest defenders are back in a triumphant climax, 11 years in the making. Despite a three hour runtime and an overstuffed preceding chapter, the Russo Brothers pull off the near-impossible by creating a wholly satisfying final chapter, and possibly the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.When we last saw the Avengers, all hope was lost. Half of all life in the universe was turned to dust. Tony Stark and Nebula were adrift on a distant planet. Earth’s remaining survivors were left to contemplate their failures. How they each deal with this speaks volumes about their Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Hey guys, it’s Kayla, back with another video. So, the topic of today’s video is being yourself.” Kayla Day (the wonderful Elsie Fisher, nominated for a Golden Globe and also heard as the voice of Agnes in Despicable Me) is in her last week of eighth grade in upstate New York, compounding the horror of being 13 years old by making self-help YouTube videos in her bedroom. “As always, make sure to share and subscribe to my channel. Gucci!” she signs off chirpily, with Enya’s Orinoco Flow as surprisingly effective background music. But is anyone watching?This directorial debut from stand-up Read more ...
David Thompson
"One talks, the other doesn’t" is about as crude a description as could be of the Swedish masterpiece, Persona. Profoundly experimental even today, Ingmar Bergman’s film was at base about the intense, vampiric encounter between a mute actress suffering a breakdown and the garrulous nurse assigned to care for her. The roles respectively announced the arrival of one fine actress, Liv Ullmann, and confirmed the brilliance of another, Bibi Andersson. Andersson later recounted that Bergman told her the silent role had to go to Ullmann as the less experienced of the two, with the assurance Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Robert Guediguian has spoken of the influence of Chekhov on The House by the Sea (Le Villa), and the shadow of the Russian dramatist, particularly The Cherry Orchard, can certainly be felt in the French director’s latest film, his 20th in a career that stretches back now some four decades. It’s there in ways that are thematic and structural equally, from its sense that a particular environment, a precious place that has defined the lives of the film’s protagonists in the past, is changing, to an unstudied story development defined by the loosely theatrical, almost “fly-on-the-wall” way in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The decades-long stage relationship between Judi Dench and Trevor Nunn translates to surprisingly little with Red Joan. This is veteran theatre director Nunn's first film since Twelfth Night in 1996. Top-billed in a supporting role, Dench brings her customary rigour and a continually fretful mien to this semi-fictionalised retelling of the plight of the so-called "granny spy", Melita Norwood, who was charged in 1999 with passing secrets to the Russians in their efforts to build an atomic bomb. (The film's actual source is Jennie Rooney's 2013 novel of the same name.) Caught unawares by Read more ...
David Nice
"Them" - the "loro" of the title (with a further play on “l’oro”, gold) - denotes the mostly sleazy opportunists willing to use and be used by "him" ("lui"), "Presidente" Silvio Berlusconi in his septuagenarian bid for an extended sexual and political life. "Us," it's implied, are the crowd and the workers present at the salvaging of a Christ statue from the ruins of the earthquake in L'Aquila at the very end of the film, an image that especially stuns in the light of the Notre Dame fire. Paolo Sorrentino is too magisterially fluid a filmmaker to suggest anything as pat as a moral comeuppance Read more ...