Film
Matt Wolf
People talk at and not to one another in Mistress America, the latest collaboration between director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig and the first to make me wonder whether the unarguably gifted real-life couple might benefit from an outside eye to let them know when enough is enough.A tribute to the life force here embodied by Gerwig as a go-getter New Yorker who may be less confident than she lets on, this short film (less than 90 minutes) starts out entertainingly enough but soon wears out its welcome on the way to an ending suggesting Baumbach and co may love this Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer, visceral performances we’ll be lucky if we get anything as strong this year as the central roles from Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in Gerald Barrett’s Glassland. Their mother-son relationship has such an almost unbearable intimacy to it that comparisons to the last chapter of the Terence Davies Trilogy aren’t out of order.In Davies’s film the son was confronting the impending death of his mother, and here Reynor (very different from the confidence of his What Richard Did character) as the long-suffering John is all too aware that’s what faces his mum Jean unless she can battle her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The epic and the intimate combine impressively in Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. The epic is there is the scale of the stunning desert landscapes that are the backdrop – though the desert itself almost feels like a character here, and generic allusions to the Western abound – to his World War One story of complicated Bedouin loyalties played out on the edges of the Ottoman Empire. The intimate is found in the close bonds that dictate characters’ behaviour, and particularly in the very subtly textured role of the film’s eponymous main character.Abu Nowar has drawn out Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Multiple stars are born in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the conventionally titled film premiered earlier this year at Sundance that turns out to be unconventional in every way that matters. Adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's novel about a 15-year-old's coming of age in the swinging, drugs-soaked San Francisco of the 1970s, first-time director Marielle Heller has made one of the most probing films yet about that painful journey we all make through what Henry James so succinctly titled "the awkward age".Along the way, Heller has given 23-year-old Bel Powley the breakout role of anyone's dreams, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When Al Pacino burst into the spotlight as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, his celebrated co-star was Marlon Brando, who for years had been giving eccentric performances and making a mockery of his talent, but was about to offer audiences a reminder of the innately consummate actor he was.Pacino’s always been much more committed to his work than Brando, and yet for too long now he’s not been kind to his reputation, resorting so often to exaggeration and ham that it was getting hard to recall him in his prime. Scent of a Woman’s Frank Slade has a lot to answer for.But his recent portrait of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his rustler sons.Ford dodges many facts about the real Earp clan’s politically driven feud with the Cochise County ranchers’ faction, which erupted inconclusively in the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. Frank Perry’s revisionist Doc (1971) comes closer to the skimpily documented truth but lacks My Darling Clementine’s mythic resonance and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
An affectingly restrained Australian drama of adolescent development coloured by the repercussions of a parent undergoing gender transition, 52 Tuesdays may initially seem understated in its exploration of the balances (and imbalances) of family relationships under stress, but finally achieves something rather deeper than its innovative broken-up narrative style at first suggests.The film’s title is explained by first-time feature director Sophie Hyde’s decision to divide her story into weekly sections (filmed just that way, once a week over the course of a year, with cast only given notes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marshland is set on possibly the last section of the Andalusian coastline which doesn’t have high-rise condos planted all over it. Imagine the Kentish marshes of Great Expectations, but with a harsh sun cracking the parched earth, while overhead the sky throngs with geese and flamingos. It’s in this inhospitable corner of Spain that young women keep disappearing, apparently lured away to the big city, never to be heard from again.Two detectives team up to investigate the disappearance of a pair of sisters. Both policemen wear extravagant moustaches, for this is 1980, with Francoism a recent Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Wrocław is Poland’s fourth most populous city, once described as "The Venice of the North", due to its location on the River Oder, its tributaries and numerous bridges. That description is misleading, of course, a touch of unfortunate hyperbole; on the surface, Wroclaw is a charming but unremarkable city.And yet if one looks beyond the late-gothic market square, the focal point for the city’s tourism, there is a different, more vibrant energy here, never more so than at the end of July, when the New Horizons Film Festival exerts its pull on Poland’s younger cinephiles, who flock to the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Don’t on any account be late for the first couple of minutes of the woolly mammoth that is Russian director Alexei German’s last film, Hard to Be a God, since the opening narrative voiceover gives a rare suggestion of explanatory background to a work that, put mildly, does not greatly trouble itself, over a lumbering length of just under three hours, with much in the way of plot explication.That opening snatch gives a gist of the wider context that German and his co-scriptwriter (and now widow) Svetlana Karmalita largely discarded from the eponymous 1964 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Indian documentarist Anand Patwardhan is far less known outside his native country than he deserves to be, and his 2002 film about nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent War and Peace (Jang aur Aman) is a good introduction to a filmmaker who has been tackling issues of fundamentalism for more than four decades.There’s no direct link to Tolstoy here, although War and Peace’s opening scenes reprise the assassination of the Russian writer’s Indian disciple, Mahatma Gandhi. The episode serves as a reminder of how Gandhi’s vision of independence has been hijacked by the growing nationalism of Read more ...