Film
David Kettle
First-time writer/director Sanna Lenken’s touching anorexia drama is such a heartfelt, fragile thing that it feels churlish to criticise it. Herself a former eating-disorder sufferer, Lenken brings a real warmth and sincerity to her portrait of an ordinary Swedish family rapidly unravelling when their elder daughter seems unable to overcome the horrible physical effects of her aching self-doubt.Precocious tweenager Stella (a magnificent Rebecka Josephson) idolises her older sister Katya (played by former child star Amy Deasismont), dreaming of emulating her figure-skating successes, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The real achievement of this remarkable DVD release from the BFI is the fact that it brings the name of George Hoellering back to our attention as a director. His 1951 adaption of TS Eliot’s verse play Murder in the Cathedral has been virtually unavailable for years, and is the centrepiece of his career, while the accompanying documentaries here reveal a fascinating and diverse talent.Those from the British film world of a certain vintage will certainly remember Hoellering in another role: for 36 years he was very closely involved with the much-missed Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, one of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What begins as a would-be exercise in camp devolves into perfervid tosh and ultimately tedium in The Dressmaker, a belligerently over-the-top revenge drama that might just about have squeaked by as an opera - an art form better-suited to such deliberately over-the-top theatrics.As it is, even the iciest of stares from Kate Winslet in haute couture mode can't sustain interest in Antipodean director Jocelyn Moorhouse's return to film directing after a long absence. "I'm back, you bastards," Winslet's anger-fuelled Myrtle aka Tilly Dunnage says at the start as she re-enters Dungatar, the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mexico City itself is the dominant presence in Alonso Ruizpalacios’ debut feature Güeros, a road movie that restricts its journey to that megapolis and its environs. It’s not just the traffic that holds them up, more the fact that they don’t really have a destination. As one of its initially dispirited student protagonists says, “Why go if we’re going to end up back here again?”Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) are studying at Mexico’s National University – except they’re not, because it’s 1999, when students there went on strike to protest the introduction of fees. The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There’s nothing more affecting in a 2015 British film than Freddie Jones reciting John Clare’s “I Am” in By Our Selves, the documentary scene that concludes Andrew Kötting’s semi-fictional paean to the Romantic poet of enclosure-traumatised agrarian England. Jones memorised the poem for his portrayal of Clare in a dramatised 1970 Omnibus instalment, ironic sound bites from which Kötting wove into his film’s aural tapestry.The venerable actor, 88, couldn’t recall all the lines, though he indicates he would’ve done if his interlocutor Iain Sinclair (Kötting’s collaborator here, as on 2012's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
By the end of the 1960s, Steve McQueen was at the top of the Hollywood heap. Star turns in The Great Escape, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt had established him as the King of Cool, a self-contained anti-hero whose minimalist, watchful performances radiated a mysterious sex appeal.But, as this haunting documentary by Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna explains, the instinctively rebellious McQueen had a burning desire to throw off the shackles of the big studios. Thus he formed his own production company, Solar Productions, and, funded by a deal with Cinema Center Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fritz Haarmann was – although the term wasn’t in use at the time – the first murderer to be recognised in Germany as a serial killer. He was executed in 1925 after being found guilty of 24 killings. Filmed in late 1973, Tenderness of the Wolves dramatises aspects of the case. It is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s frequent collaborator Ulli Lomell – they had most recently worked together on Effi Briest. Nonetheless, Fassbinder produced and acted in Tenderness of the Wolves, and many of his regular players including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Cavena and Kurt Raab appear. A very creepy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
David Sington’s The Fear of 13 is many things – blisteringly immediate, compelling, emotionally devastating – but at times it may have you pondering whether it fits into any traditional “documentary” category.Over the hour-and-a-half of its run, it has us readjusting our perceptions on that score, as well as teasing us slowly towards understanding its subject. The mystery starts with the opening screen title that tells us that, after two decades on America’s Death Row, a convicted murderer has petitioned the court that his sentence be carried out – that he be executed. The monologue that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Maggie Smith is in her element as Miss S in the film version of Alan Bennett's 1999 play The Lady in the Van, her partnership with the playwright-actor one of the defining components of the storied career of the octogenarian dame, whose renown has leapt the decades due in no small part to the Harry Potter and Downton Abbey franchises. And if this latest exercise in bravura doesn't quite deliver the emotional sucker punch of her solo turn in Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils, which Smith performed on screen and stage, the chance to see a genuine acting legend give her all to the begrimed Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A Derby County footballer said of his boss Brian Clough in the late 1960s: “He’s a swine, but you’d give him your last half-dollar". Clough’s ability to inspire a do-or-die mentality – and undying loyalty – in the Nottingham Forest players he forged into Europe’s dominant club side comes across forcefully through their comments in I Believe in Miracles, which arrives on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital next week with a 31-minute making-of featurette.There’s nothing of the “swine” in Jonny Owen’s upbeat documentary: a celebration of Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor’s guiding of Forest to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of years ago there was a television documentary about Steve Jobs which wafted much smoke up the sainted iHole. A variety of famous fanboys wept over the curve on the iPhone 3 and simpered at the kleptocratic takeover of the music industry. Never mind that Jobs was reportedly short of redeeming features. A documentary has no obligation to supply drama. A feature film is another story. The makers of Steve Jobs have their work cut out finding something plausibly nice to say about a driven egomaniac who tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s changing the planet.Michael Fassbender is always Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
American director Sean Baker is an adept at exploring different Los Angeles worlds that we don’t often see portrayed in standard Hollywood fare. His much-acclaimed Starlet, from 2012, took us into the city’s porn industry (in an entirely non-judgmental way), ticking most of the boxes usually associated with “independent” cinema.Tangerine goes further out on a limb, and proves an energy-driven piece that seems to breathe the life of the seedy streets of the less salubrious end of Santa Monica Boulevard around which it’s set. Baker developed his story of two transgender prostitutes by working Read more ...