Film
The Wall of Shadows review - a holy Himalayan mountain and a Sherpa family's dilemmaThursday, 21 April 2022
“You’re mad to try and climb a holy mountain,” says Jomdoe, wife of Sherpa Ngada, as they argue over whether it’s more important to respect the body of God, aka the mountain Kumbhakarna in eastern Nepal, or to take the money earned from a dangerous... Read more... |
Playground review - bleak but brilliant schoolyard dramaThursday, 21 April 2022
Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The 400 BlowsTuesday, 19 April 2022
Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in... Read more... |
Operation Mincemeat review - Colin Firth and co practise the fine art of deceptionFriday, 15 April 2022
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few... Read more... |
The Lost City review - terrific odd-couple comedyFriday, 15 April 2022
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss... Read more... |
The Northman review - Robert Eggers's elemental Viking epicFriday, 15 April 2022
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white... Read more... |
Benedetta review - lesbian nuns' sex and faith collideFriday, 15 April 2022
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a... Read more... |
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle review - three decades of hell in the PacificWednesday, 13 April 2022
Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably... Read more... |
Murina review - her father, her jailerWednesday, 13 April 2022
Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Nineteen Eighty-FourTuesday, 12 April 2022
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: West Side StorySunday, 10 April 2022
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves... Read more... |
The Outfit review - threadbare tailor-gangster yarnSaturday, 09 April 2022
“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be? And who is he underneath?” Leonard is, in common parlance, a Savile Row tailor – “a cutter from the Row,” he insists – fetched up for murky... Read more... |
