Film
Jasper Rees
There’s nothing like the Palio, the race which twice each summer plunges the city of Siena into a state of collective derangement. If you’ve been you’ll know. If you haven’t, watch Palio for the closest approximation to actual attendance that any filmmaker has yet achieved. And there have been many attempts.The horse race, consisting of three circuits of the city’s apron-shaped Piazza del Campo, contains multitudes. Its roots in medieval history go so deep they’re virtually unfathomable, while the loyalty of each citizen to their district – ingested with la latte della mamma – must be Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Death of a Gentleman begins as a hymn to Test cricket, and becomes an elegy, as its makers cross the globe in a deceptively haphazard-looking pursuit of the men who run the game. Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins are two journalists in search of a story. That the plot is not a murder mystery (who killed cricket?) but a jellyfish – Who’s running cricket? What do they want? Is anyone not in the pocket of an Indian concrete company? – becomes the story itself.Tightly cut from around 50 talking heads, it’s a film that shouldn’t work. There is no silver bullet. Cricket-lovers have watched the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Saoirse Ronan, emerging decorously into womanliness in Brooklyn, deserves a stack of awards nominations for her portrayal of a brave young woman torn between her old life in Ireland and her new existence in 1952 New York's most vibrant borough. Restraining her character’s flickers of doubt, culpability, satisfaction, and pleasure, Ronan shows how the maturation of Eilis Lacey – from seasick voyager and homesick immigrant to serene resident – is attributable to her hard-won stoicism and quiet determination.Ronan’s performance is not enough to make John Crowley’s movie great. Short on conflict Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A huge lizard in sunglasses” was Robin Askwith’s impression of Pier Paolo Pasolini on first meeting the Italian director. The actor’s entertaining, often funny and affectionate recollections of Pasolini are heard during a lengthy interview which is one of the extras on the home cinema release of Abel Ferrara’s homage to the director of Accattone, Theorem, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom and The Canterbury Tales, which featured Askwith. By bringing a wider context, the interview contrasts with Pasolini which, instead of dramatising Pasolini’s career, focuses on the events in the hours Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
However it is looked at, Sleepwalker is one of British cinema’s strangest films. What initially seems to be a Mike Leigh-style, Abigail’s Party-ish hyper-real take on middle class mores quickly becomes an intense journey into dystopian horror which nods to both Italian gialli and films which deconstruct the nuts and bolts of British social attitudes. If late-period Mario Bava and Lindsay Anderson had collaborated to direct an episode of The Good Life, this might have been the result.Sleepwalker begins simply enough. Angela and Richard Paradise (Joanna David and Nicholas Grace) are urban, Read more ...
David Kettle
Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.A couple of the opening weekend’s events, however, felt far more straightforward in their melding of sound and vision. In the appropriate surroundings of Glasgow’s ultra-modern Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Taxi Tehran is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since the 2010 prohibition that, among other restrictions, forbade him from working in cinema for 20 years. While its very existence may count as an achievement in itself, much more importantly it’s also a lovingly cheeky riposte to those who have restricted his freedom of thought (and movement), as well as a reflection on narrative and how it is created.First there was This Is Not a Film from 2011, in which the director’s house arrest was reflected in the enclosed internal space of his home-filming. There was at least a change of Read more ...
graham.rickson
This is a reissue, but an important one, especially considering that the film industry’s gender inequalities are as entrenched as ever. Kay Mander’s cinematic career began in the mid 1930s when she became a publicist for Alexander Korda. She joined the Shell Film Unit in 1940 as a production assistant, directing her first documentary in 1941. It’s included here: How to File is a still watchable seven-minute training film aimed at metalwork apprentices. Mander’s unfussy, fluent style makes it a pleasure to watch. We get three longer shorts aimed at fire service and civil defence workers. Each Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kim Longinotto’s Love Is All stitches together short extracts from 75 different films, aiming to highlight changing British attitudes to love, sex and romance. It opens with a one-minute 1899 short which looks forward to the closing shot of Hitchcock's North By Northwest, and the final montage includes scenes from My Beautiful Laundrette and news footage of a same-sex wedding in 2014 Islington. It’s frequently a frustrating viewing experience: the short running-time means that most of the clips are just too brief. Though watching the film on DVD means that you can at least refer to the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them to create a kind of self-narrating autobiography. The notion that we're hearing Brando telling his own story from some post-corporeal ether is reinforced by the device of opening the film with a computerised 3D talking head, based on a digital image of Brando's own head made in the 1980s. "Actors are not going to be real," it predicts, in Brando's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As further proof that films in a lower-key can often land with the greatest impact, along comes Mississippi Grind, a casually mournful, beautifully made road movie that is perhaps best described as the picture that Robert Altman didn't live to make. A conscious throwback to the era of Altman's California Split, this latest from the writer-director team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden locates an almost Chekhovian melancholy in its portrait of two gambling men, drifters both, in search of an actual and metaphoric pay-off from life. As unforced in its telling as the neatly arrived-at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Attempting to halt an enemy army with a small unit of troops on bicycles seems impossible and improbable, but this is exactly what happened at Lundtoftbjerg in the south of Jutland in the early hours of 9 April 1940 as Germany invaded the strategically important Denmark.Although the assault was launched on more than one front, this aspect of the land campaign is the subject of the Danish film April 9th, which tells the true story of how ill-equipped, low-population Denmark had no chance. Even so, the Danish troops did what they could after first sighting the invaders at 4.50am. There were Read more ...