Film
David Nice
From Hollywood in 1928 back to Petrograd in 1917 and forward again, the fortunes of Emil Jannings' General Sergius Alexander encapsulate the ambivalence of Austrian-American Josef von Sternberg's silent masterpiece. Our protagonist seems heartless and complacent at the beginning of the central flashback, but loves his country; a smouldering-eyed revolutionary girl (Evelyn Brent), persuaded of his patriotism, seems ultimately happy to become his sex-slave; and her boyfriend (William Powell), head of the Kiev Imperial Theatre entertaining the troops as an actor, is later free as movie mogul to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Dazed and Confused, college days. This successor to Richard Linklater’s 1993 cult favourite about high school hedonism in 1976 moves on to the start of a 1980 college term. Everybody Wants Some!! is named after a Van Halen song instead of the earlier film’s Led Zeppelin but, with the Reagan years yet to kick in, little culturally essential has changed. The pursuit of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll remains these American kids’ inalienable right.Linklater has observed that, as well as being a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, this starts where the Oscar-winning Boyhood ends, with a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital. Fitting it into the venerable “city symphony” film genre, defined by the magically evocative Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), is a challenge Read more ...
Susanna White
Last week a report was published by Directors UK laying out the cold facts of a trend that a lot of us knew had been going on for a long time - if you are a man you are six times more likely to make a feature film than a woman. The needle hasn’t moved for the last 10 years.What shocked industry insiders was the funnel effect on women’s careers. Unlike science and engineering which have had trouble attracting girls, 50 percent of the entry into film schools is female, and 49 percent of people entering the industry in vocational roles like runners or production assistants are women. What the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The fountainhead of creativity is at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s English-language follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The film is set in a Swiss hotel-cum-sanatorium whose summer residents include Michael Caine as a composer who remains resolutely retired even when the Queen sends a messenger to request he perform for her, and Harvey Keitel as a fading filmmaker who still believes he has skin in the game.Also loitering on the premises are Rachel Weisz as the composer’s heartbroken daughter, whose marriage to the scriptwriter’s son has just ended, and Paul Dano as a hot Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.The latest Le Carré adaptation features an innocent bystander sucked into a plot to bring down a shady business organisation which has links to self- Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Early in the first part of his sprawling metafictional docu-whatsit Arabian Nights, the director Miguel Gomes is reflected in a café window as he flees his crew for conceiving the absurdly overambitious project he’s set up. It was "the dumbest idea", he says in voiceover, to think “I could make a fine film of wonderful, seductive stories while following Portugal’s miserable situation for a year.” To reconcile militancy and escapism, he goes on: “That is betrayal. Disengagement. Dandyism.”For this crime against cinema, Gomes (pictured center, below), his sound man (boom in hand), and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss. Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept of Room as a home entertainment is freighted with irony. Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel, which she adapted for Lenny Abrahamson to direct, tells of a young woman who, abducted at 17 and held in captivity, has for five years brought up her son in the eponymous room. Their world – the world of Ma and Jack - is 121 feet square, and they have to make their own home entertainment.The film is most celebrated for the compelling performances. Brie Larson won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta as a mother who like a magus recreates her narrow world from scratch. Just as remarkable is Jacob Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The sad, short life of country legend Hank Williams makes for a surpassingly dour biopic in I Saw the Light, which does at least prove that its protean star Tom Hiddleston can do a southern American twang and croon with the best of ‘em. If only the actor weren’t trapped in the feel-bad film of the season.But as written and directed by Marc Abraham and broodingly shot by the great cameraman Dante Spinotti (LA Confidential, The Last of the Mohicans), the film wears Williams’s unlikeability like some perverse badge of honour, and even Hiddleston’s natural warmth can’t cosy the audience up Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to a packed Carnegie Hall at the age of 76 in 1944. Meryl Streep plays her as only Meryl Streep can. But what of the man without whom her story would have been impossible? Nobody knows anything much about St Clair Bayfield (played by Hugh Grant, pictured below) beyond the skeletal facts: that he was her common-law husband and a not very successful character actor on Broadway. So who was he really? Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There are times when you sit in the cinema and wish that you didn’t speak English and could just enjoy what you’re seeing. Unfortunately Knight of Cups is one of those times. This is a stunningly beautiful film, the first of Terrence Malick’s films to be (mainly) set in Los Angeles, and it features amazing work by long-term collaborators cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and designer Jack Fisk. But its narrative voiceover and dialogue are excruciating, quasi-parodic and they drag down the stunning images irretrievably.This is a world of gorgeous women, glossy minimalist architecture, movie- Read more ...