Film
Graham Fuller
A master of visceral cinema, Samuel Fuller (1912-97) directed 23 features during his exemplary career, writing 21 of them and an unquantifiable number of others. Clips from many appear in A Fuller Life, an affectionate documentary conceived, co-produced, directed, and introduced by Samantha Fuller, his proud daughter, and culled, word for word, from Fuller’s posthumous autobiography, which was co-authored by his wife Christa Lang Fuller (the documentary’s executive producer) and Jerome Henry Rudes. Oddly, those clips weren’t really needed.They illustrate, of course, Fuller’s frazzling tabloid Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The ongoing penchant for all things royal reaches a momentary impasse with A Royal Night Out, an eye-rollingly silly imagining of what the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth might have got up to on VE Day. Its release timed to coincide with the pro-monarchy rush of feeling that the latest royal birth has only intensified, Julian Jarrold's film will please those who want to feel as if they're vaguely au fait with the House of Windsor while getting to glimpse some rather grand houses in the process. If as much attention had been paid to the script as was lavished on the decor, the results Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much- loved institution and all who sail in her. An episodic tour through the galleries and the backrooms the public never see, it greatly lends itself to DVD. Indeed, much as one goes back to a gallery to look at just one painting, its 15 chapters can be visited and revisited on an individual and selective basis.Wiseman is as interested in people as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In The Tribe, his feature debut, Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy has created something totally unexpected, and viscerally powerful to boot. This dark tale of life among inmates of a Kyiv institution for the deaf avoids spoken language completely, leaving viewers to assemble the narrative for themselves: communication is only in sign language, heralded consciously in an opening screen-title as presented without translation, subtitles or voiceover.Clearly Slaboshpytskiy’s predominantly teenage, non-professional cast know what they’re getting up to, but we’re left guessing until Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
ellin.stein
Jon Stewart’s Rosewater falls into the micro-genre of films about foreign correspondents struggling with the moral imperative to move from observer to participant, not a question that keeps most viewers up at night. But where Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously engaged us through a stirring romance and Oliver Stone’s Salvador through a stirring bromance, Stewart takes a more austere approach. He wants to instill passion about an idea – the importance of bearing witness – rather than taking the audience on that X-Factor staple, an emotional journey.In his native US, Stewart Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of their cinematographer Jack Cardiff and a couple of their stock players (Marius Goring, John Laurie), Lewin’s 1951 film is set in Spain “about 20 years ago”, under an “erotic and disturbing” moon, outside its Anglo-American leads’ normal place. When a mysterious Dutchman (James Mason, pictured below) moors off shore, events move outside time, too.The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and iterates, as no other film has done in recent years, the politically incorrect but no less obvious and appalling notion that a woman’s face is her most valuable real estate, the thin, fragile wall that separates her from emotional destitution.A woman effaced, this fable-like drama insists, is a woman invalidated – a theme previously explored, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with Peter Firth's Sir Harry Pearce at its centre. Where, as the Spookfather-in-chief, he had to be.Since Spooks stuck unswervingly to its grand tradition of bumping off leading characters – diehards will still be wiping away a tear at memories of Rupert Penry-Jones's Adam Carter, Richard Armitage's Lucas North and Nicola Walker's Ruth Evershed – Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Confounding expectations from the first frames, Girlhood is the endearingly scrappy and staggeringly beautiful third film from French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) and no relation to Boyhood. Intimate and exuberant, it's a coming-of-age story that takes us into the company and confidences of a quartet of teenage girls. They're part of a community of marginalised minorities living in the rundown Parisian suburbs, and have forged their own alternative family unit as a sanctuary from and defence against domestic abuse, poor prospects, societal assumptions and criminal opportunists. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous adversaries. Despite the inevitable plot-holes and sometimes incredible storylines, Spooks managed to keep itself anchored in the bleak realities of intelligence work, where it was wise to trust nobody and if you were paranoid, that's because the bad guys really were out to get you.As a string of leading actors such as Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Whatever you make of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (Jiao you), it’ll likely have you looking at your watch. If you’re hypnotized by its almost narrative-free, stretched naturalism – stretched so far as to become effectively stylization – part of the interest will be in knowing just how long the director holds some of his crucial scenes; the closing one, wordless and virtually still, must come in at almost a quarter of an hour. If it’s mesmerizing self-indulgence that hits you instead, the question may be when to head for the door when this distinctly testing 138-minute work Read more ...