Film
Tom Birchenough
Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15 1919, her body then thrown into a canal), as her significance and influence as a political figure attracts new attention, the film deserves the handsome restoration it receives here in StudioCanal’s “Vintage World Cinema” strand; particularly – remarkable though it may seem, even given von Trotta’s rather neglected Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If we think of Robert De Niro and Brian De Palma, we likely think of The Untouchables from 1987 with the great actor in his career pomp, chewing up the scenery in a memorable cameo as Al Capone. However, the pair had history. They made three films together in the 1960s – Greetings, The Wedding Party and Hi, Mom! – which are now gathered together in 2K restorations from the original negatives. The short of it is that two of them are now little more than historical curios for archivists, but the other is revelatory on a number of counts and well worth exploring.The Wedding Party began Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With Russian spies murdering people in the UK, a Norwegian pensioner jailed in Moscow on spying charges, Russian hackers believed to have meddled in both the US presidential election and the EU referendum, diplomats thrown out of various countries and Donald Trump being portrayed as Putin’s puppet, it’s hard not to feel that the Cold War is being warmed up for the 21st century. So while the spy genre is as busy as ever, this feels like an opportune moment to revisit or discover some of the best made during or about the Cold War period itself – from both sides of the Iron Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I want to be a man without any past,” said Michel Legrand, who has died at the age of 86. He had perhaps the longest past in showbiz. Orchestrator, pianist, conductor, composer of countless soundtracks, who else has collaborated as widely - with Miles Davis and Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbra Streisand and Jean-Luc Godard, Gene Kelly, Joseph Losey and Edith Piaf? When I visited him at his house at his splendid classical manoir 100km south of Paris, on the mantelpiece in the large white sitting room four familiar gilt statuettes stood sentry. The oldest was for “Windmills of My Mind”, the best Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Baggage can weigh a movie down. The Mule comes with quite a bit of baggage, and not just the kilos of coke stashed in the car’s trunk. Clint Eastwood’s fifty plus years as a screen icon turned director, his dodgy love life and libertarian politics all make it hard to walk into a cinema showing his latest film without dragging along a whole load of preconceptions. If an unknown director (who was not also playing the lead) had made this well-crafted and enjoyable shaggy-dog story of a film, this would be a different review. But it’s Clint, so every frame is coloured by his legend and sometimes Read more ...
Owen Richards
Destroyer. It’s an apt name. Like the film, it's grandiose and blunt. Nicole Kidman is almost unrecognisable (a requirement when aiming for nominations) as Detective Erin Bell, a damaged survivor of an undercover heist gone wrong. When her target resurfaces after 17 years, she must pull her life together to hunt him down and finally close the case, whatever it takes.When we first see Detective Bell, she’s barely holding it together. Approaching a crime scene, she looks like an old punk star that stopped enjoying the drugs long before she stopped taking them. Limping, eyes barely open, and a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Satire was once thought in America to be that thing that closed on Saturday night. Not here: filmmaker Adam McKay goes the distance with Vice, a hurtling examination of realpolitik that puts Dick Cheney under a spotlight at once satiric and scary. Do we have Dubya's onetime veep to thank for the subsequent rise of Trump and the parlous state of affairs Stateside since then? Perhaps, and one of the many strengths of this eight-times-nominated Oscar hopeful is its ability to cover the historic and thematic waterfront whilst keeping a keen eye on the slippery if malign presence at its centre. Read more ...
Owen Richards
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still. On Her Shoulders shows this exhausting commitment, simultaneously in the public eye yet seemingly ignored when action is required.As we’re introduced to Nadia, we quickly understand the strain this touring causes, constantly made to relive her horrifying experience for interviews. Her work is valuable for the public to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard E Grant has captivated the internet. The actor greeted the news of his nomination for an Academy Award by returning to his first rental when no one had heard of him. There he whooped with childlike delight, and then shared the whole thing in an utterly disarming Instagram post. He also phoned up his co-star and co-nominee Melissa McCarthy, and together they cried. Perhaps now Grant will finally be umbilically linked in the public mind to his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (pictured below), for which he has been nominated as Best Supporting Actor, as well as his career- Read more ...
Owen Richards
Nadia Murad caught the world’s attention when she spoke at the United Nations Security Council. She spoke of living under ISIS, daily assaults, escaping, and the current plight of the Yazidi people, in refugee camps and still under ISIS control. It was a heart-breaking plea for support to the world’s silent nations. But in a rapidly changing news landscape, it’s easy to stay silent and wait for the next story come to come along.On Her Shoulders is a new documentary about Nadia’s plight, and specifically the amount of travelling, planning and interviewing she subjects herself to just to keep Read more ...
graham.rickson
Keda’s already in trouble for not living up to his father’s expectations. And then there’s an unfortunate clash with an angry bison which sends him careering down a steep cliff face and left for dead. Welcome to Upper Paleolithic Europe. Albert Hughes’s Alpha doesn’t contain many narrative surprises; its plot involving a lost boy struggling against the odds to get back home is straightforward in the extreme.Keda’s essential decency is signalled early on via chiselled cheekbones and glossy hair. Kodi Smit-McPhee succeeds brilliantly in bringing him to life, which can’t be easy when he speaks Read more ...
Robert Beale
In contrast to a classic film soundtrack played live with the film, the idea in "symphonic cinema" is that the music, and its interpretation, come first. So the conductor is literally setting the pace, and to some extent the atmosphere, while the film is controlled in real time by an "image soloist", and the visuals follow the music’s lead rather than the other way round.It’s the brainchild of Lucas van Woerkum, who is that soloist, appearing on stage next to the rostrum like a concerto virtuoso, with a touchscreen as his instrument, and taking his bows alongside the maestro – in this case Read more ...