Film
Demetrios Matheou
French director Jacques Audiard is a master at genre with a twist, most famously the prison drama A Prophet, but also a number of crime thrillers with atypical settings or themes, including The Beat that my Heart Skipped (classical music), Dheepan (political refugees) and Read My Lips (office politics). Audiard turns genre templates upside down, sometimes merges them, invariably with excellent results. Having now turned his attention to the western, it’s not surprising that he’s created one of the best I’ve seen for years. Based on Patrick DeWitt’ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you,” Al Roberts (Tom Neal) says in Detour (1945), as if his native pessimism and self-destructive choices had nothing to do with his inexorable descent into hell.Edgar G Ulmer’s minimalist film noir classic, which has been beautifully restored for this Criterion Collection release, tells a rancid tale. Roberts himself narrates it in an increasingly feverish voiceover. Early on, one of the flashbacks to his memories that comprise most of the movie, shows him as a talented pianist backing his singer girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) in a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's all go – no, make that Van Gogh – when it comes to the Dutch post-Impressionist of late. Opening the same week as the Tate Britain's blockbuster exhibition about his years in London comes the artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel's biopic of the tragically short-lived artist, for which its star Willem Dafoe was an unexpected Oscar nominee last month for best actor. Ravishing to the eye as one might expect, and acted with a near-ferocious empathy by Dafoe (who, thank heavens, doesn't worry about an accent), the film as a whole is sure to divide opinion. Shot with a Read more ...
Tom Baily
At the start of Carol Morley’s noir mystery Out of Blue, detective Mike Hoolihan, bleary-eyed and slow, is carrying some burdensome weight. “This burger from last night is not sitting right,” comes the weary female investigator’s first line. Hoolihan’s fondness for late-night Louisiana diners does not prepare her well for the early morning murder call. Despite the ache, however, her indigestion is mostly a mental one. We see it in the face of Patricia Clarkson (in a strong, eerie performance) and her rumination-worn look, the creases of time etched under dark sunglasses. Hoolihan is so Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I met Agnès Varda, who died today aged 90, just once, for the interview that’s reproduced below. It was in Paris in January 2018, shortly before the Belgian-born filmmaker was to become the oldest Oscar nominee in history, for the wonderful documentary Faces, Places. The encounter felt like a lucky break – blessed exposure to an icon and one of the most grounded and delightful inspirations one could imagine.On paper, the event was of the sort that journalists loathe, a ‘round table’ that, due to Varda’s popularity, grew by the second until there were perhaps 30 interviewers surrounding the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Frank Sidebottom was a petulant, man-child showbiz trouper with a papier-mâché head. He was more spontaneously subversive than memories of his heyday rampaging round Nineties kids TV may suggest. As to the rigorously hidden man behind the mask, he was more peculiarly brilliant than that.Steve Sullivan’s revelatory documentary finally unveils Chris Sievey, who only averted a pauper’s funeral in 2010 thanks to an outpouring of public support, but left 100 boxes of art in a damp cellar which are in their way priceless. Sullivan’s obsessive sifting of this obsessive creative life reveals the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular for almost two decades now, and one of the festival’s more frequent prize-winners: over his career he has come away with two Grand Prix (for 2003’s Distant and 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), the Best Director award in 2008 (Three Monkeys), and the Palme d’Or for his previous film, Winter Sleep, in 2014.Which made the fact that The Wild Pear Tree came away without a gong last year something of a surprise in itself, and indeed Ceylan seems to be rather treading water with his new film. It charts territory familiar from his Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At its heart, Disney’s fourth-feature, Dumbo, was about the love between mother and child, and defying expectations. The 1941 animation was based on Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl’s short story and told the tale of a baby circus elephant with oversized ears and big blue eyes, who is given the cruel nickname of ‘Dumbo’, until those that tormented him realise his ears are magical and enable him to fly. It was a sweet and simple Ugly Duckling tale with a macabre edge, so who better to direct the update than the man who brought us Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands?Understandably, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Us is Jordan Peele’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 horror film, Get Out, which won the first-time writer-director an Oscar for best original screenplay. A lot has been riding on this, Peele’s sophomore film with questions being raised over whether he would succumb to the pressures of a bigger budget and make a far more obviously commercial movie. So far Peele is riding the wave, Us has already broken records in the USA where it’s had the highest grossing opening weekend for an R rated film ever. It's also won mainstream critics’ praise for its attack on America's neglect of its Read more ...
Owen Richards
Where would you go for a devastating study on the human condition? The home movies of teenage skaters would be very low down on that list. But most of those movies aren’t filmed, compiled and analysed by Bing Liu, the director of Minding the Gap. Perfectly balancing perspective and curiosity, it’s perhaps the most unexpected achievement on the year.Liu has apparently always been the one behind the camera. From his early teens, he’s been pointing the lens towards his friends, primarily Zack and Keire. They’re both friends we recognise: Zack is the joker, always up for partying hard, and Keire Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For admirers of Henri-Georges Clouzot or Brigitte Bardot, this Criterion restoration of their rarely seen 1960 collaboration is a must have. La Vérité may not be Clouzot’s greatest film, the pace is a little slow and for British viewers uninterested in the French legal system, the courtroom scenes may occasionally drag, but it’s a powerful film nonetheless.Bardot plays coquette Dominique Marceau, bored of life in her provincial home town and her working class family. She persuades her parents to let her live in Paris with her prim older sister Annie (Marie-José Nat) a violin student at Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Local Hero, released in 1983, has been adapted into a musical, with a book by playwright David Greig and more songs from the soundtrack's original composer Mark Knopfler. After its premiere at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh, it will arrive at the Old Vic in 2020. No British film from the Eighties can lay claim to quite such lasting and deep-seated affection as Bill Forsyth’s modest masterpiece – not even Chariots of Fire, which was David Puttnam’s previous triumph as a producer. Though not a great commercial success at first – it had a limited release in America – it went on to bloom on VHS Read more ...