Film
Kieron Tyler
The two words cut to the chase. The cast play, or actually are, maniacs. There are lots of them. Multiple Maniacs also nods to the title of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1964 proto-gore movie Two Thousand Maniacs! John Waters’ 1970 second full-length film also borrows from Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Tod Browning’s’ Freaks as well as demonstrating a fondness for John Cassavetes’ affected naturalism. And yet this was, and remains, a film like no other.That the black-and-white Multiple Maniacs is perverse is a given, but seeing it with fresh eyes rams home its aberrance and wilfulness. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Olivier Assayas was born into French cinema, as the son of screenwriter Jacques Remy, but his three acclaimed decades as a director have followed a mazy course. His latest film, Personal Shopper, continues his potent collaboration with Kristen Stewart (pictured below), after her supporting role in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). She plays Maureen, a medium with a day-job as a supermodel’s personal shopper, who’s awaiting a post-death sign from her recently deceased brother. Assayas observes her with a mix of cool detachment, queasy eeriness and hot bursts of horror which typifies his work’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Attention must be paid," we are famously told near the close of Death of a Salesman. And so it was this year on Oscar night when Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (A Separation was the first), this time for a movie that leans heavily on Arthur Miller's classic – though whether as crutch or inspiration will remain for individual viewers to decide.Intriguing moment to moment without being quite as searing as it surely intends, the movie may with time be remembered more for reasons to do with politics than with art: Farhadi refused to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D. Salinger-like William Forrester, who wrote a generation-defining novel, but now lives as a secretive recluse in a locked Bronx apartment. This Oscar-winning role joins Playing By Heart (1998) in reviving Connery’s range, away from the wry old-time Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more. Director Olivier Assayas reunites with Kristen Stewart from Clouds of Sils Maria and again, she’s playing an assistant to a celebrity/actress. This time she plays Maureen, a personal shopper, picking out couture outfits and Cartier jewellery for her boss’s various glamorous appearances, skittering between the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The curious thing about Reset, the documentary that tracks the making of a new ballet by Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opera Ballet, is that it clearly had another agenda. Millepied, a Frenchman nicely named for his profession, was a left-field appointment as director of the 335-year-old institution in 2014. He lasted only two years, but that in itself is hardly a story given the number of his predecessors whose tenure was even shorter.The film was shot over a period of weeks during the same season that saw Millepied quit, yet reveals no serious friction. Okay, so the 36-year-old breezes Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this Beauty and the Beast as a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/ Read more ...
graham.rickson
The creative, organisational and intellectual properties of slime mould are outlined in loving detail in Tim Grabham and Jason Sharp’s engaging documentary The Creeping Garden, though even this peculiar organism seems a little colourless when compared to the folks getting excited about it. Like the engaging amateur mycologist seen foraging in the Oxfordshire woods, for whom slime moulds are “a sideline”: Mark’s enthusiasm is so infectious that it’s hard not to get excited when he finds some, a mass of tiny yellow spheres buried in the soil.Long dismissed as just another fungus, its unique Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming Oscar-winner Emma Stone might secretly admit that perhaps the wrong woman won on the night.But it has to be admitted that Elle (adapted by screenwriter David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel “Oh...”) could never be mistaken for a Hollywood production. A perplexing but electrifying mixture of sexual violence, black humour and social satire, it Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Has the British seaside ever looked more alien than in Roman Polanski’s absurdist drama Cul-de-Sac? Filmed on Holy Island, the tide steals the causeway that led craggy American gangster, Richard (played by Lionel Stander) to an isolated, run-down castle where he proceeds to terrorise the couple who live there. Richard’s partner in a heist-gone-wrong drowns slowly in their getaway car – they’ve stolen a driving instructor’s jalopy – and he holes up with George (Donald Pleasence) and Teresa (Francoise Dorléac) and torments them. Very much influenced by Beckett and Pinter, this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There have been three versions of King Kong and only one of them answers the question of how they get a massive ape back to New York. In 1976 they shipped him in an oil tanker, but the vessels in RKO’s 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s 2005 homage were nothing like big enough.The new Kong is so colossal that there is no thought of monetising him back in the Apple. How would they airlift him off? This 3D neo- monstrosity stands 60 foot tall, twice the size of any previous screen appearances. They’d need a fleet of helicopters to lift him, and he doesn’t like choppers: a fleet of them are soon Read more ...
Saskia Baron
From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21st-century Western. Subtly feminist, she paints a portrait of women making their way in a male landscape, steeped in pioneer history and overshadowed by economic disappointment. Certain Women is adapted from three short stories by Marile Meloy, but it could have Read more ...