Film
Jasper Rees
Olivia Williams’s first film was, (in)famously, seen by almost no one. The Postman, Kevin Costner’s expensive futuristic misfire, may have summoned her from the depths of chronic unemployment, but the first time anyone actually clapped eyes on her was in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, in which Bill Murray most understandably falls in love with her peachy reserved English rose. Then came The Sixth Sense, in which with great subtlety she in effect gave two performances as the wife/widow of Bruce Willis, depending on whether you were watching for the first or second time.The summons to Hollywood was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.Dirk Bogarde is needle-sharp as Melville Farr, a sophisticated London barrister with a successful practice who is about to become a QC - and whose tamping down of his homosexuality has filled him with angst. He lives peaceably, however, with his wife Laura (Sylvia Syms Read more ...
graham.rickson
Baron Munchausen’s exploits have been filmed before. Terry Gilliam’s star-studded 1988 version floundered thanks to a sub-par script, and there’s an infamous 1943 German adaptation, commissioned by Goebbels. This one, Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, is far better than both. Completed in 1961, it’s technically stunning. Knowing how Zeman’s tricks were realised doesn’t diminish their brilliance, and one of the bonus features from this Second Run release shows a group of contemporary Czech film students attempting to reproduce iconic moments from the film. Baron Munchausen was a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is the Dunkirk spirit? It has been so thoroughly internalised by the national psyche that, 77 years on, it’s as much a brand, a meme or a slogan as the product of a historical fact: that at the start of World War Two 330,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, cornered on a French beach, strafed and bombed by the Luftwaffe, were ferried to safety by a plucky flotilla of pleasure barques and rickety fishing boats. Triumph snatched from the jaws of unimaginable catastrophe.How do you capture that spirit on film? People keep trying. ITV made a three-part docudrama in 2004. It is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In his biography The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman recalls his first encounter with the Swedish island of Fårö, in 1960, when location scouting for his next film, Through A Glass Darkly. A last, desperate bid by the film’s producers to find a cheaper setting than Orkney turned out to be fortuitous in more ways than they could have imagined.“If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home,” Bergman recalls; “if one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight.” He told his cameraman Sven Nykvist “that I wanted to live on the island for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality. “My problem is that they don’t let me in to take part.” In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981, 1950s-set reworking of Sternberg’s Dietrich-creating Weimar classic The Blue Angel, the original’s voracious femme fatale becomes a wistful, drunkenly mercurial, not unkind sexual businesswoman. She’s the emblem of 1950s West Germany, ready to be bought and sold to get ahead, and put a difficult past behind her.Fassbinder turned the lush Technicolor palette of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s “women’s” melodramas feverish for a Read more ...
David Kettle
"You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it." So goes David Lynch’s memorable description of what he calls "the art life" in Jon Nguyen’s frank and engaging documentary. It’s a life that Lynch imagined himself living as a student and a young man – surrounded by the detritus of a disorderly studio, working all hours at his latest visual creation. And for some of his early life, at least, it’s exactly the life that Lynch lived.It’s this early period in Lynch’s creative life that’s the subject of Nguyen’s film, charting his childhood and student years as a driven, Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Earlier this year Adeel Akhtar won the BAFTA for best actor. In Murdered By My Father, he gave a heartbreaking performance as the widowed father of a daughter who goes against his desire to arrange an advantageous marriage for her. In a nuanced domestic tragedy, he revealed fresh depths of agony, fear and rage that will have surprised those who mainly knew him as Faisal, the dimwitted terrorist in Four Lions. It was a triumph for Akhtar in his first real leading role, but also for BBC Three, and for the great wealth of British Asian actors.Since his wonderful turn in Four Lions, Akhtar has Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An isolated girls' school finds its hermetic routine shattered by the arrival of Colin Farrell, who wreaks sexual and emotional havoc as only this actor can. Playing a Civil War deserter with a gammy leg, Farrell's Corporal McBurney is at first rendered exotic, not to mention eroticised, by the distaff community into which he has stumbled in 1864 Virginia only in time to be eviscerated by them. Tennessee Williams, one feels, would have had a field day with the same scenario – less Suddenly Last Summer than Suddenly Cold Mountain, to cite an earlier film inhabiting this same period that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There’s been talk about the way this latest instalment of the rebooted Ape franchise, and the one which brings the story of the brainy messianic ape Caesar full circle, is an allegory of Isis’s onslaught in Iraq or the rise of Donald Trump. Certainly there are piteous scenes of fearful apes traumatised by military attacks, while the evil and genocidal Colonel McCullough (Woody Harrelson) is building a wall round his base to keep his enemies out (see, just like the Donald’s Mexican wall!), but it seems all this had been written before the events they supposedly reflect.Wipe away that knee-jerk Read more ...