Film
Saskia Baron
Rebecca Miller’s fiction and her previous films’ manifestly ambitious visual style and narrative structures led to high expectations from Maggie’s Plan. As a movie, it may appeal to audiences craving the kinds of films that Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Richard Curtis make – talky comedies revolving around middle-class professionals chewing over their relationship crises with their friends. But if that’s not your cup of decaf, it may just grate on your nerves.Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, an arts administrator in her early 30s, contemplating single parenthood with the help of donated sperm. She Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Notes on Blindness is an extraordinary film that wears its original genius lightly. The debut full-length documentary from directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney, it may seem complicated in its assembly, but has a final impact that is luminously simple. And to speak of a film whose immediate subject is the loss of sight – and by extension, of the visual element that comprises cinema itself – in terms of luminousness is finally no paradox at all.It’s the story of John Hull, an Australian-born theologian whose acclaimed 1990 book Touching the Rock recorded his experience of going blind. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Irish director Pat O’Connor’s 1987 adaptation of J L Carr’s A Month in the Country has been unavailable for many years; this BFI reissue was only possible after a few surviving prints were located. It’s a disquieting watch – a superficially English reflection on faith, loss and recovery, full of dark shadows and sharp edges. Simon Gray’s screenplay wisely avoids using a voiceover, the plot’s subtleties conveyed instead by a well-chosen cast.Notably a young Colin Firth as Birkin, a world-weary World War One veteran arriving in a remote Yorkshire village to uncover a mural in the Reverend Keach Read more ...
Ed Owen
The last film to feature the Chilean coup was No from 2012, which explored the referendum that finally rid the country of General Pinochet and returned the country to democracy. There a genius adman plotted a brilliant campaign to get the right answer. Perhaps worthwhile viewing for those planning referendums?In The Colony Daniel (Daniel Brühl) is an activist graphic designer and photographer based in Chile, making posters and flyers backing socialist president Salvador Allende immediately prior to Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Daniel's air stewardess girlfriend Lene (Emma Watson) arrives Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Luca Guadagnino’s previous film, I Am Love, confirmed the Italian renaissance begun by Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino. Star Tilda Swinton, ripe sensuality, rich landscapes and sometimes operatic emotion all return for A Bigger Splash. Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson complete its quartet, lounging and sparring on Pantalleria, the Italian island where Swinton’s Bowiesque rock star, Marianne Lane, is hiding out after a vocal chord op. Harry (Fiennes), with his apparent daughter Penelope (Johnson) in tow, is her former producer and lover, whose sudden appearance Read more ...
David Kettle
Even without any particular pomp or focus for celebration, the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival has felt like a particularly strong and broad-ranging one, with a programme so big it was a struggle to take it all in.Opening golf drama Tommy’s Honour (reviewed by Demetrios Matheou last week) may have failed to thrill, but there’s been plenty more to entertain and provoke. And as the EIFF heads towards its closing gala – with the Gillies MacKinnon’s remake of Whisky Galore! on Sunday evening – it’s inevitably time for the festival to reveal its award winners.The Michael Powell Award Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are often times as adults, that we feel ill-prepared for dealing with situations that arise. There is no equivalent of a Brownie’s badge for “taking responsibility” “progressing the career ladder”, “finding your life partner” or “coping with grief”. But by age 30, somehow, inexplicably, we’re supposed to have it all under control. Rachel Tunnard’s debut feature film departs from this social norm, and takes a look at what happens when the dream is derailed.Anna is a sub-functional almost 30-year-old living in a shed at the foot of her mother’s garden. She dresses, acts and speaks like a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In the mid 1970s, the German director Wim Wenders quickly and cheaply made three road movies that, taken together, can be considered the apogee of the genre. The Criterion Film Collection, which has released them in in the US as Blu-ray and Region 1 DVD sets supplemented with new interviews, outtakes, and two early Wenders shorts, has not yet added them to its UK release roster. His British devotees now face the existential dilemma of whether to pay over the odds for the discs with the devalued pound – or to wait for a local street date.Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move (the lone colour entry Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Shamed and reviled, Richard Nixon had the misfortune (albeit self-authored) to be the star of one of the murkiest chapters in American Presidential history. It's not much compensation for him now, but he has become something of a goldmine for film-makers.Anthony Hopkins went to town on him in Nixon. Zack Snyder brought us a grotesque, parallel-universe Nixon in Watchmen. Frank Langella revelled in the wily, devious President in Frost / Nixon. Now here's Kevin Spacey with what could be the best Nixon yet, in Liza Johnson's delicious fantasy-satire about the day when the President met the King. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Edinburgh film Festival’s signature prize, named after one of its most celebrated directors, is the Michael Powell Award for best British feature film. The dozen up for the award this year have included a Scottish love-triangle road movie, a dystopian drama, an adaptation of Macbeth, and a Welsh language thriller involving identical twins. Where once British film was a predictable affair, rooted in costume drama and social realism, it appears to be happily diverse at present.Two in particular took my fancy. And while neither is perfect, each fulfilled expectations – one for performance, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The wish to return to a place of past safety after a traumatic event is understandable. It helps if that place is remote and possibly beyond the reach of any authorities which may want to investigate the event, or even hold someone accountable. In the case of Iona, it’s a return from mainland Scotland to the Inner Hebridean island of the same name where she grew up. It’s not instantly clear what caused her to come back but when she does, it’s apparent that memories are long and the welcome is not as warm it might be. She has a son whom no-one has previously met. The past has to be faced and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Susan Sarandon's natural radiance papers over a considerable number of cracks in The Meddler, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's loving, largely autobiographical tribute to the kind of mum you might want on occasion to throttle but in the end adore beyond all words.Her grin as wide as the distance between the American coasts that she has traveled in order to start life anew, Sarandon has been given – and runs with – one of the most generous-hearted screen heroines in years.So what if some of the film's rhythms are off and Scafaria's screen alter ego – Rose Byrne (pictured below, with Sarandon Read more ...