Film
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
Argylle review - Matthew Vaughn's secret agent fantasy dares you to deny itFriday, 02 February 2024
Mystery surrounds the provenance of Matthew Vaughn’s new spy fantasy, Argylle. Allegedly, it’s based on the debut novel of the same name by Elly Conway, with Bryce Dallas Howard playing a novelist called Elly Conway in the film. But evidence of the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Frightened WomanTuesday, 30 January 2024
Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 debut The Frightened Woman toys with living up to its title, suggesting a sadistic test of endurance. Its Italian title, Femina Ridens, though, translates as The Laughing Woman, and this is really an ironically extreme... Read more... |
This Blessed Plot review - a right old English carry onSunday, 28 January 2024
The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Eternal DaughterSunday, 28 January 2024
In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its... Read more... |
The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screenSaturday, 27 January 2024
How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two... Read more... |
All of Us Strangers review - a haunting story about the power of love, masterfully toldFriday, 26 January 2024
Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. It starts with the familiar sight of a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Life on the LineSunday, 21 January 2024
Wax lyrical about the contents of a British Transport Films short and you might start sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, railing about things being better back in the day. On the evidence of this 15th volume in the BFI’s anthology series, many... Read more... |
The End We Start From review - watery apocalyptic drama with star turnFriday, 19 January 2024
The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting... Read more... |
The Holdovers review - a perfectly formed comedy that wears its perfection lightlyFriday, 19 January 2024
Twenty years ago Alexander Payne put Paul Giamatti on the map in Sideways; here he is again, as another punctilious expert, this time not in the field of viniculture but plain old culture, of the old-fashioned classical kind. And his adversary is... Read more... |
Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer review - the visionary director's extraordinary careerFriday, 19 January 2024
“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.Who else, muses Wim Wenders, one of the many... Read more... |
The Disappearance of Shere Hite review - the rise and fall of a woman who dared to explore female sexualityFriday, 12 January 2024
When it was published in 1976, “The Hite Report” caused such a sensation that it was translated into 19 languages and flew off the shelves in 36 countries to become the 30th best selling book of all time. Yet it’s author, Shere Hite was treated as... Read more... |
