Film
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven directing Isabelle Huppert as a woman seemingly unfazed by a violent rape sounds a recipe for outrage. Elle (★★★★) , though, provokes in subtle, lingering, sometimes comic ways. The rape of Michele (Huppert) mostly happens off-screen during the opening credits, though the ski-masked intruder’s violence in her plush, gated Paris house will be replayed as memory and fantasy. It’s what happens next that lurches right off the rails from the leering salaciousness, traumatised horror or rape revenge cinema usually gives us. Michele cleans up, and gets on with her day. She isn’t the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter was released in 1968, the screenplay adapted by James Goldman from his long-running play. Loosely based on historical fact, the Lear-like plot charts an ageing King Henry II’s futile attempts to choose a successor after the premature death of his eldest son.The film’s pleasures are many. A hyperactive Peter O’Toole chews up the scenery as the monarch, aided by a superb supporting cast. Crucially the film looks right: filmed on location in France, we really do get a sense of the era’s grubbiness. Badly-dressed peasants and numerous chickens flood the few Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cinema trailer for A Monster Calls ★★★★ looks faintly ludicrous, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around the landscape, but don't be deceived. In conjunction with screenwriter Patrick Ness, who also wrote the original novel, director J A Bayona has conjured a bittersweet and often painfully moving account of bereavement and growing up, in which the grim burden of terminal illness is alleviated by the healing power of art and fantasy. In the lead role of 12-year-old Conor O'Malley, trying to cope with being bullied at school while his mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) fades inexorably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction.In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light relief by bantering bad-temperedly with his trailer-neighbour and AA sponsor Kirby (William H Macy, pictured below Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is farce played at a bizarre pitch, hysterical and absurd. Its Polish director, Andrzej Zulawski, remains most notorious for Possession, the 1981 horror film about marital immolation in which Isabelle Adjani erupts with a juddering, liquefying, demonic miscarriage in a Paris subway, earning her Best Actress at Cannes and the film a UK ban as a Video Nasty. Zulawski’s final film is more gently reflective at heart, but still uncompromisingly unique.Dissolute law student Witold (Jonathan Genet) and his friskily omnisexual friend Fuchs (Johan Libereau) fetch up at a rural French boarding Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Can Louis Theroux bring anything new to the Scientology party? If you’ve seen Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s detailed documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book, or watched Tom Cruise acting weird on YouTube, you already know that the Church’s great secrets are not so secret any more. We’ve heard about the aliens and the galaxies, the E-meters and the Operating Thetans, the elite Sea Org and the hellish conditions in the Hole.No Scientology members are going to open up to Theroux, however charmingly open-minded he may be, and he doesn’t want to do another Going Clear, with disillusioned ex- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators. I suspect a combination of circumstances to be at work: the lower international profile of Australian Ballet relative to others who do cinema screenings, like the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi; the multiplex location, where the culture on screen market is less developed than at arts cinemas which show plays/ballets/operas/exhibitions much more often; and perhaps also the fact that the Sleeping Beauty Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much was anticipated from Tate Taylor's film version of Paula Hawkins's bestselling novel, but there really are times when the best plan is to stay home with a good book. Despite a high-octane girl-power cast and the lustrous screenwriting reputation of Erin Cressida Wilson, this thing clanks along like the 3am milk train to Exeter sidings.It probably didn't help that the action has been transported from Hawkins's grimy London commuterland to the plusher environs of upstate New York (though at least it means Emily Blunt's rail-riding character, Rachel, always gets a seat), which seems to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic. Striking the balance between the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m so tired of hearing that McQueen is the best show we’ve ever done. It’s become a bit of an albatross,” complains Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan museum’s costume institute (he’s from Blackburn, Lancashire, and loved the New Romantics as a teenager). Bolton’s huge hit, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, took fashion as art to a new level in 2011. “It would be nice if China was able to knock it off its pedestal.”Andrew Rossi’s behind-the-scenes documentary (his last one, Page One, examined the New York Times) charts the complex process of getting the Met's 2015 show Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We haven’t been here before. Tehran in 1980, bombed by its Iraqi invaders and jumpy with revolutionary fervour, is a place preoccupied with ordinary fear. Showing the normal if pressurised life he remembers from childhood in this demonised country is debutant writer-director Babak Anvari’s first coup. Letting this slide slowly into Persian myth and cinematic dread opens a new door in horror. The more arch A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night introduced the genre to the Iranian diaspora. Under the Shadow’s politicised, feminist tale turns the Tehran flat it barely leaves into a terror landmark. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“For a husband to stray he is merely responding to his biology. But for a woman to behave in a similar way is ridiculous, unimaginable. Just the idea is funny.” This unwitting strapline issues from the boobyish Sir James Martin towards the end of Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s delightful riff on Jane Austen which, in the person of Lady Susan Vernon, proves quite the opposite is true.Lady Susan is played by Kate Beckinsale with grace, wit and much unmelted butter in her mouth. She was Emma Woodhouse once, Austen’s better-known minx, before shoving off to Hollywood barely ever to return Read more ...