Film
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his.There couldn’t be a more iconic signature for a career spent giving birth to weirdos, wackos, outsiders, victims, lunatics and flamboyants. Quentin Crisp, Caligula, Profumo-suicide Stephen Ward, Elephant man John Merrick Read more ...
theartsdesk
This weekend T2: Trainspotting is released in cinemas. It's taken 21 years for novelist Irvine Welsh, director Danny Boyle, scriptwriter John Hodge and the famous cast to get back together. That's not actually that long, though. This year Blade Runner 2049 is promised following a gap of 35 years after Ridley Scott's original film. Dick Van Dyke is heading for the UK to take a part in Mary Poppins Returns 64 years on, this time starring Emily Blunt in the title role.In this edition of Listed we trawl through the archive for the longest waits in cinematic history. On grounds of artistic merit, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Victor Erice is one of the great Spanish directors of the last century, though much less prolific than his compatriots Buñuel and Almodóvar. There are three key films, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Quince Tree Sun and El Sur (The South). All three are characterised by an intense attention to the act of seeing, the mystery of presence and the power of the imagination. They are slow, beautiful films – every frame a delight – that benefit a great deal from being seen on a large screen or in the cinema. The lighting of interiors is often dramatic, conjuring an introverted and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.Not that Gibson, as director, is doing anything very different to what he's always done. Hacksaw Ridge is a story of religious faith under pressure, and of imperturbable heroism in the face of extreme violence. Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides sufficient fuel to power the new film Denial, even when the creative team don't always seem to be giving the charged material their best shot. I exempt from that charge a first-rate cast in which a lips-pursed, blazing-eyed Timothy Spall excels yet again, this time playing Irving. And the stakes posed by the narrative are high enough that one is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a story of an adorable dachshund and her cross-country travels, divided into four parts. So far so cute, but as this is a Todd Solondz movie, it doesn’t stay that way. Kids, avert your eyes. The dog’s first home – and the most impressive part of the film – is with lonely young Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) who’s recovering from cancer. He names her Weiner-Dog and they bond (the first shot of Remi is of him lying on bright green grass in a pose straight out of Boyhood, though similarities end there). But control-freak dad (Tracy Letts) is an owner from hell, even though it was he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This had better not be shite, Danny," was the warning delivered to director Danny Boyle from his cast, amazingly reunited from the original Trainspotting 21 years later. They had reason to be fearful, knowing how things often go with sequels, but Boyle, teaming up again with original screenwriter John Hodge, has pulled a fabulously misshapen rabbit out of his hat, which triggers echoes of the 1996 film yet can stand unaided in its own right.The first film's odyssey of a bunch of Edinburgh heroin addicts yawed vertiginously between horror and farce, though its pounding pop-culture veneer Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“A First Lady must always be ready to pack her suitcases,” remarks Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Melania Trump, take note. Jackie, the first English-language film by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain (Neruda, No), is set in the week following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, as Jackie moves out of the White House and before the Johnsons move in. In a disjointed, non-chronological way – the assassination scene keeps recurring – it’s framed through the lens of Jackie’s interview for Life magazine.The unnamed journalist (an unsympathetic Billy Crudup) is based on Theodore H Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The homecoming narrative is one of the most elemental ones we know, playing on the most primal human emotions. Stories of separation and reunion have been handed down from time immemorial, varying in their specifics but dominated by their intricate connection to feelings of origin and identity. Lion may be inextricably linked to the details of contemporary life in one sense, but its final scenes have a power that goes far beyond it. In director Garth Davis’s hands the story is told with a sensitivity that avoids the lure of sensationalism.Adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having Read more ...