Film
Sebastian Scotney
The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have been turbo-charged, mad-staring, cringe-inducing figures occupying the centre of comedies and propelling them at least as far back as Molière, and continuing through John Cleese, Jim Carrey, and others.Robinson made his name in quickfire TV series consisting of sequences of gags, such as Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. Such sketch-based material is easy binge-fodder, but after a few episodes it can start to feel like a disposable, single-use product. It is therefore understandable Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”So says Gen, AKA Genesis P Orridge, AKA Neil Megson, in David Charles Rodrigues’s intimate portrait, filmed toward the end of his/her life, bare-chested, huge of torso, talking while posing in an artist’s studio for a larger-than-life portrait, getting up from the chair to gaze at their own image, tracing the contours of blue tattoos on the arms and torso, including that of a gun.This is a human being who, by their own account, died twice. Once Read more ...
graham.rickson
Heart of Stone (Das kalte Herz) was the first colour film produced by East Germany’s state film studio DEFA, a big-budget spectacular which attracted huge audiences upon its release in 1950.This adaptation of a macabre 19th century fairytale by Wilhelm Hauff was greenlit on the proviso that the film would be a parable about the virtues of hard work, lowly coal merchant Peter Munk’s downfall caused by his use of dark magic to improve his wealth and status rather than honest toil. DEFA brought in the West German Paul Verhoeven (not to be confused with the director of Robocop) to adapt and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A three-century-spanning countdown rapidly ticks to a version of now, and a beaten Superman (David Corenswet) ploughing into Arctic snow. His super-whistle fetches Superdog Krypto to excavate him like a favourite bone, and drag him to crystalline sanctuary the Fortress of Solitude. James Gunn’s vision for this fourth modern cinema Supes and DC Universe launch embraces the character’s simplicity and silliness as Zack Snyder constitutionally couldn’t. But by leaving the familiar origin largely implicit in a tale set three years into Superman’s adventures, the DCU’s hoped for new dawn Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Can a romcom be intellectually challenging while hitting all the sweet spots of the genre? Jonás Trueba, the director of the award-winning Spanish film The Other Way Around (Volveréis, literally “you will return”), has confected something close to that.The bare bones of his storyline are that a couple in Madrid, after 14 or 15 years (they don’t seem sure), have mutually decided to separate, and to throw a party in celebration of their split. Like people entering a marriage, they want to be sure their party is like a wedding, but “the other way around”. The action follows their elaborate Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The journey not the destination matters in The Road to Patagonia, an epic pilgrimage of 30,000 miles that, unexpectedly, turns into a love story. Surfer boy and ecologist Matty Hannon grew up in Australia but after reading a book at university about the shamans of Mentawai in western Sumatra he dropped out and went to live with them in the Indonesian rain forest.The prelude to Hannon’s film, which he assembled from 16 years of diary footage, celebrates the tenacity of the Salakirrat family in spite of efforts by politicians and clerics to outlaw their animistic culture: “We tell the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...
John Carvill
Andrew Sarris, doyen of auteurist film critics, dubbed A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”. Wild over-praise, or sly, back-handed compliment?"Jukebox musical" connotes the sort of "exploitation film" Elvis churned out. Corporate suits with Dollar sign eyes may have wanted to exploit The Beatles, but the band were too savvy. Despite the fact that pop phenomena tended to fizzle out fast, meaning their time in the spotlight might be limited, The Beatles had refused several film offers before A Hard Day’s Night, holding out for something real, something, in John Lennon’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman whose repressed trauma has confined her to a wheelchair for 20 years. She’s so querulous and demanding that whether she gets up and walks at the end matters less to the viewer than her frustrated caregiver daughter’s ability to free herself from Mum’s mind-forged manacles. The world belongs to the young, after all.Former librarian Rose (Fiona Read more ...
James Saynor
“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.As far back as the cheap and nasty Shivers, Cronenberg molested the line between the quick and the dead, pioneering horror motifs like inflamed-penis parasites bursting out of stomachs and plugholes and into people’s orifices. His films became famous for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with pizzazz by Steven Spielberg, it was ground-breaking (and indeed ground-shaking) enough to earn admission to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry on account of being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.Six more Jurassic-themed movies followed in its wake (with Spielberg only directing 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but none of them managed to match the impact of the original. Indeed, most of them needn’t have bothered Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb flew to Sudan after the overthrow of hated dictator Omar al-Bashir, hoping to chronicle the dream of an Arab country shaken up by a feminist revolution. The young pro-democracy activists, mostly women, she met at a sit-in protest outside army headquarters in Khartoum became the focus of Sudan, Remember Us, which she filmed over the next four years.However, this sad and lyrical movie didn’t turn out quite the way she’d imagined. The revolution was hijacked by a violent military crackdown and civil war that have now left Read more ...