Film
David Kettle
Matthew Holness clearly knows a thing or two about low-budget British horror from the early 1970s. In TV comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace he was as merciless as he was affectionate in ripping the genre apart. His debut feature as writer-director is an odd, woozy creation that pays just as overt homage, but Possum is in another tonal world altogether – one that’s brooding, clammy and unremittingly grim.Former children’s entertainer Philip – disgraced, though we’re left to guess precisely how – makes a physical and psychological return to the charred, crooked remains of his boyhood home, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Starr Carter is 16 years old and her life straddles two very different worlds, the posh prep school she goes to with its privileged white students and the troubled black neighbourhood she lives in with her family. And like its heroine, The Hate U Give straddles two very different genres, playing as both a teen drama about friendship, bullying and boyfriends and an African-American call-to-arms about police brutality. It’s not always the most seamless of hybrids and occasionally the joins show in the casting choices and the didactic expository dialogue, but the film is held together by a Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that is, apart from his trusty sheepdog Zafrana and Andalusian donkey Gorrión.It’s such a bizarre idea, in fact, that a travel agent whose help the old man attempts to enlist worries he’s being pranked. But what’s most successful, and memorable, about Chico Pereira’s poignant documentary – co-produced by the Scottish Documentary Institute, and winner Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s not for nothing that Alfonso Cuarón’s mercurial CV includes Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, because this director really knows something about alchemy. His last, the Oscar-winning Gravity, was a science fiction spectacular made oddly intimate by its focus on a lone astronaut in the expanse of space; his latest concerns the travails of a domestic worker in Mexico City, and is a family story with the visual expression of an epic. That versatility and facility are the domain of a master filmmaker. And the glorious Roma may well be Cuarón’s best yet. The Mexican’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Olivia Colman will in due course be appearing as Elizabeth II in The Crown, surely a role of a very different hue to her portrayal of Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (shown at LFF). It’s the beginning of the 18th Century, and England is struggling with the increasing costs of war with the French. Colman’s infirm, mentally erratic queen quails at the prospect of decision-making as preening politicians screech and chatter around her. She’s also at the hub of a sex-and-power triangle as her close friend Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and a newcomer to the court, Abigail Hill Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There aren’t many movies that cater to audiences with a passion for canine grooming, the mafia and dismal seaside resorts but Dogman more than satisfies all those cravings. Ten years after Matteo Garrone won Cannes with the searingly brutal Gomorrah, the director returns with another drawn-from-life tale of everyday Italian mobsters. The titular hero is Marcello (Marcello Fonte), a scrawny little geezer who runs a beauty parlour for dogs in a grungy town marooned by the sea. The film opens with him nervously primping a snarling pitbull that looks as if it could eat him for breakfast. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
While much has been said of Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s cult horror Suspiria, it’s the latest stylishly bizarre confection by British writer-director Peter Strickland – about a demonic dress, no less – that comes much closer to the strange spirit of Italian horror. Strickland is the sort of filmmaker who wears his inspirations on his sleeve, while managing to transcend them with his own wit and imagination. Berberian Sound Studio was his homage to giallo, The Duke of Burgundy to Euro-pudding erotica. In Fabric has a bit of both of those Read more ...
David Kettle
More than 1,700 teenage finalists representing 78 countries take part in the annual International Science and Engineering Fair, virtually the Oscars for exceptional young biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, doctors and more.If they’re selected for ISEF, these young brainboxes get to show the fair’s forbidding judges what contributions they’re planning to make to our futures – and compete with each other to be named best in show. It’s a remarkable (and, as the contestants point out, very American) event, and an even more remarkable gathering of young people Read more ...
Owen Richards
Watching Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum, you’d be forgiven in thinking he was a tortured soul. Lead character Phillip (played by Sean Harris, pictured below) is a lean marionette of a man, prone to horrific flights of fantasy involving a human-headed spider puppet. Nauseating sequences are punctuated by the unmistakable drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, while the significance of a local kidnapping begins to seep into Phillip’s life.In person, whatever dark shades Matthew Holness has are well hidden. As charming as he is self-effacing, he speaks passionately about crafting a film Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth. Its hour and 40 minutes length is never dull, offering up regular revelatory tidbits, but rather than a driving sense of focus and purpose, Greenfield chooses to wander her chosen terrain in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.Perhaps they shouldn’t have opened with the titular story of Buster Scruggs, because it’s so outrageously laugh-out-loud brilliant that the viewer is apt to suffer a kind of bereavement at the realisation that Scruggs won’t be reappearing in later Read more ...