Film
Corsage review - Vicky Krieps is superb as Empress Elisabeth of AustriaFriday, 30 December 2022
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant,... Read more... |
'Corsage' director Marie Kreutzer: 'Being beautiful is her only currency'Friday, 30 December 2022
It’s 1877, and Austria’s Empress Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps) is first seen gasping under freezing water, skin blotchy with another extreme treatment to maintain her legendary beauty. Every day she constricts herself in her corset, as she’s constrained... Read more... |
The Pale Blue Eye review - telltale heartsTuesday, 27 December 2022
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Something in the DirtTuesday, 27 December 2022
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson deal in the modern eerie and truly weird, placing relationships under supernatural pressure with unsettling empathy. Where genre-schooled peers such as Ti West and Adam Wingard splice post-slacker, naturalistic... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Ghost Stories for Christmas, Volume 1Sunday, 25 December 2022
The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series first consisted of eight short films broadcast between 1971 and 1978, five of which were adaptations of short stories by MR James.Shot on 16mm film instead of videotape, most were directed by documentary... Read more... |
Wildcat review - damaged war veteran reborn in the Peruvian jungleFriday, 23 December 2022
The bond between humans and animals sometimes passeth all understanding. Wildcat is the story of 20-something British Army veteran Harry Turner, American ecologist Samantha Zwicker, and a young ocelot called Keanu, who becomes an almost mythic... Read more... |
Top 10 Films of 2022: ConclusionFriday, 23 December 2022
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (... Read more... |
Avatar: The Way of Water review - is that all there is?Friday, 23 December 2022
You may wonder: is this it? James Cameron’s Avatar sequel replays Earth’s colonial assault on Pandora in the original, cancelling out the blue-skinned native Na’vi’s victory under the Dances With Wolves-like, blue-white saviour command of Jake Sully... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Mike HodgesThursday, 22 December 2022
It can be reasonably argued that Mike Hodges, who died on 17 December, was the finest director of British crime films since Alfred Hitchcock. Though Hodges succeeded in other genres, his Get Carter (1971), Croupier (1998), and... Read more... |
Adam Sweeting's Top 10 Films of 2022Thursday, 22 December 2022
1. Nightmare AlleyIt’s the late 1930s, and the America depicted here is still lost in the purgatory of the Great Depression. Director Guillermo del Toro has described it as “a straight, really dark story”, but it grips like a sinister,... Read more... |
Sebastian Scotney's Top 10 Films of 2022Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand... Read more... |
Markie Robson-Scott's Top 10 Films of 2022Tuesday, 20 December 2022
Madness, introspection, and childhood trauma all feature in the best films of 2022: a good year for delving deep. Triangle of Sadness is over-the-top, cathartic lunacy – don’t see it before going on a cruise – while The Banshees of Inisherin... Read more... |
