Film
Graham Fuller
Films that show a young couple’s love deepening are rare because without personal conflict there’s no narrative progression. They're especially rare in the current mainstream American cinema since romantic dramas are commercially risky, though LGBTQ entries like Carol and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, following Brokeback Mountain, have found strong critical favor. Set in Harlem, mostly in the early 1970s, Jenkins’ latest, If Beale Street Could Talk, forcefully bucks the anti-romantic trend with its story of passionate soulmates Tish Rivers and Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (KiKi Layne and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
All may be true but not much is of interest in this Kenneth Branagh-directed film that casts an actor long-steeped in the Bard as a gardening-minded Shakespeare glimpsed in (lushly filmed) retirement. Seemingly conceived in order to persuade filmgoers of the man from Stratford's greatness (does that really need reiterating?), the movie benefits from the inestimable presence of Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, the latter in a sizzling cameo that briefly lifts proceedings to a different level. But Ben Elton's eye-rolling script pays homage to the Bard's "beautiful poetry" one time too many and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Is everything awesome? Indeed it is if you like your movies brightly coloured, packed with jokes and really quite loud. Almost five years after the first Lego movie impressed critics and entranced its target audience of families with young kids, its sequel blasts on to the screen and will probably not disappoint fans of the original. Finn (Jadon Sand) hasn’t aged much and is still constructing elaborate Lego worlds, but rather than his dad and the evil Craggle glue threatening his creativity, it’s his little sister Bianca (Brooklynn Prince) and her candy coloured Duplo that form the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a wonderful little gem! This documentary by American duo Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside lasts 76 minutes, but I could happily have watched it for hours. The film addresses a desperately sad and difficult issue – what to do with an elderly relative who suffers from dementia and needs constant care – but does so with such a light and compassionate touch that it is pure joy.When 93 year old América fell out of bed, her neighbours heard her cries and called the police. Luis, her son and sole carer, was out at the time, so they charged him with neglect and put him in jail. América Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Joel Edgerton’s second turn as a director is the second film in a year to treat the subject of gay conversion therapy. The first was Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, whose victory at Sundance a year ago confirmed, symbolically not least, its origins within the world of American independent cinema. By contrast, Boy Erased comes squarely out of the studio system, with an approach to theme and broader treatment that is clearly aimed at a wider audience.For once, however, it’s not a case of Hollywood simplifying or reducing its starting material. Edgerton himself adapted Read more ...
graham.rickson
The opening shot of Jan Němec’s 1964 debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, recalls the start of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Němec’s camera also ducks and dives, here following a pair of teenagers fleeing from a moving train and escaping into a forest (cinematography, Jaroslav Kucera). Steadicam wasn’t an option back in 1964: Nemec’s solution involved building an elaborate wooden track for his camera. Stretching for hundreds of metres, it consumed a third of the film’s budget. As a special effect it’s both extraordinary and unobtrusive, entirely in keeping with Diamonds’ pared-down aesthetic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The release of Matthew Heineman’s film A Private War, about the tumultuous life and 2012 death of renowned Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin, has gained an added edge of newsworthiness from this week’s verdict by Washington DC’s US District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Amy Jackson ruled that Colvin’s death in the besieged city of Homs was “an extrajudicial killing” by the Syrian government. Bashar al-Assad’s administration has been ordered to pay $300m in punitive damages, as well as compensation to Colvin’s sister Cathleen. It may take an intervention by the US Marines Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it with all these new films based on biographies? Vice, Green Book, The Mule, Stan & Ollie, Colette… and that’s before we even get to the royal romps queening up our screens. At least Can You Ever Forgive Me? brings a lifestory to the cinema which isn’t too familiar to audiences outside literary America. It’s based on the autobiography of a professional biographer, Lee Israel, who made her living writing about people like Katherine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead before coming a cropper on an unauthorised account of Estée Lauder and ending up broke and desperate. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ghosts of previous B-movies flit through this low-budget lesbian vampire flick. Part Hammer horror, J-horror, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, it is ultimately about a young woman in a very large house full of unpleasant people out for her blood. Director/co-writer Iain Ross-McNamee’s suggestion of a Brexit metaphor may not be wholly far-fetched, as we busily rip ourselves apart in a frenzy of auto-cannibalism. At least the cast here look good doing it.The titular crucible is used in a black-and-white, English Civil War-set prologue to keep a female vampire’s undead flesh alive, till Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With five nominations, Green Book is cruising optimistically towards Oscar night, but it’s not all plain sailing for director Peter Farrelly’s mixed-race fairy tale about a posh black musician and his thuggish Italian minder. The film is being called out in some quarters for its glib and simplistic attitude to racism, while relatives of the real-life black protagonist Dr Donald Shirley have contested the factual accuracy of the script.Which is a shame, because if you were able to ignore the bubbling undercurrent of unease and take it as a slice of mainstream movie-going, Green Book is Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene.We open at the Art Basel Miami Beach, where art snobs with fat wallets glide from room to room with glazed eyes as they gaze at the objet d'art. There's a talking robot exhibit Hobo Man, and a giant polished silver orb pocked with holes you can stick your arm into - what it does it mean? No one cares much, it’s about how much it’s worth. It’s all incredibly pointed and fun, with Gilroy showing up the Read more ...