Film
Nick Hasted
Mother love is mangled, yanked inside-out and tested almost to destruction in Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s heartfelt horror debut. The Babadook enthusiastically fulfils its remit to scare, but finds its fright in the secret corners of maternal instinct, where frustration, grief and violence meet.Amelia (Essie Davis) is the mother of 6-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who was born hours after her husband died in a car crash, speeding to the hospital as she went into labour. The matrix of guilt and mourning from that trauma still defines Amelia and Samuel’s relationship. She looks Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.Set in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If you make a film about logging, you better be sure the audience can see the wood for the trees. When Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper lead a cast, usually they can do no wrong. Alas, where Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle offered wit, surprise and characters to root for, such qualities are in meagre supply in Serena. Timber!Cooper plays Pemberton, a logging entrepreneur in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, and, as played by the Czech Republic, they do indeed smoke and shimmer in many a lingering panoramic shot. It’s the start of the Depression, so Cooper is Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Falling in love for the first time is one of the standard tropes of the movies. Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro gives it a new twist by making the teenage hero of his The Way He Looks (Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho) blind, and realising in the course of the film that he’s gay.It’s a modestly stated drama that won prizes at this year’s Berlinale, that speaks wider than its subject matter suggests. Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) has been blind from birth, so he never sees what we, the viewer, implicitly see: his Sao Paolo surrounding world, divided between home and school. What then is the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blaxploitation, like Krautrock, is an early Seventies term that sounds faintly uneasy now. Begun by Hollywood studio hits such as Shaft, the craze for films with mostly black casts and often black creators made expressly for black audiences was basically positive, though. Blacula (1972) gave the vampire flick its makeover, as an 18th-century African prince hoping Count Dracula will help him end the slave trade is instead cursed to be undead, and left entombed till two gay interior designers, distracted by what a feature his coffin will be, unwittingly unleash him on Seventies LA.Neither Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When can Nazi Germany be humanised? Never, many German critics believed on Germany, Pale Mother’s 1980 release, when it was apparently despised for its “subjective” account of one woman and her daughter’s lives in that era and its aftermath. Director Helma Sanders-Brahms simply ignores the question, pouring her own mother’s experiences into the lust for life of glamorous Lene (Eva Mattes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s one-time wife), whose proud, ironic smile lets her deal with family friends becoming Nazi bureaucrats, the air raid during her daughter’s birth, and being raped on rubble by US GIs Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Normally in Hollywood films, adult siblings being forced to spend time together is Thanksgiving-related, but in Shawn Levy's latest it's their father's death that brings the four grown Altman children together. Their dad, Mort, although an atheist, had a dying a wish to have his Jewish heritage honoured by his family sitting shiva (seven days of mourning).Shades of The Big Chill then in the comedy drama, as Judd (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Tina Fey), Phillip (Adam Driver) and Paul (Corey Stoll) gather in their sprawling suburban childhood home, where mother Hilary (Jane Fonda) - a writer of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is an epic chamber piece by a contemporary great. From the moment a stone suddenly smashes the car window of landlord Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), physical threat darkens the corners of the remote Anatolian hotel-home he shares with his bitter, bored sister Necla (Demet Akbao) and young, emotionally dying wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen). But unlike Ceylan’s previous sagas, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Three Monkeys, the violence remains verbal.Aydin, an ex-actor who never quite made it, leads a comfortable, unchallenged life in a home that’s likened to a Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In the vein of My Left Foot, Inside I’m Dancing and Gaby: A True Story, Margarita, With A Straw focuses on living a full life with cerebral palsy. Laila (Kalki Koechlin) is a young woman who lives in Delhi with her supportive and loving family. Despite ructions between mother (Revanthi) and daughter, Laila’s life is pretty good. Growing up is another matter and after one particular embarrassment, she takes on an opportunity to study in New York City. There, she discovers physical love with blind activist and girl power proponent Khanum (Sayani Gupta).Well structured and intentioned, writer Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Circuses were a regular touchstone for Fellini, and clowns, as this 1970 TV movie confirms, their troubling core. I Clowns’ first 25 minutes are a dry run for Amarcord’s raucous flashback to Fascist Rimini. Beginning with the boy Fellini woken in the night by a circus's arrival, his camera takes a ringside view of the hoarse bluster and escalating mania of a Twenties show, orchestrated by clowns who frighten Fellini. His observation that their grotesquery was in those days common in Italian small towns allows an aside into sketches of such characters: a horse-drawn carriage driver, huge like Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Alan Rickman returns to film directing 17 years after he first stepped behind the camera with a film as pulpy and bodice-ripping as his debut feature, The Winter Guest, was chilly and austere. Visually enticing and packed with a blue-chip international array of actors, several of whom have precious little to do, A Little Chaos addresses a preferred English topic (gardens and gardening) displaced to some mighty elegant French environs. The result is pictorially ravishing if often pretty silly, though filmgoers of a certain disposition may be too dazzled by the scenery and frocks to care. Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There is loud Oscar talk surrounding the stellar performance by Steve Carell in director Bennett Miller’s genuinely unsettling Foxcatcher. Miller (Capote) tackles yet another true crime drama, this time following the steps leading to the murder of David Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion. Top athletes need patrons and Schultz’s brother Mark (a truly exquisite performance by Channing Tatum) thought he’d found his in John E. du Pont (Carell), the scion of the du Pont chemical fortune. This is the story of how two champion wrestlers and one very wealthy man end up on the road to tragedy. Read more ...