biopic
Saskia Baron
What is it with all these new films based on biographies? Vice, Green Book, The Mule, Stan & Ollie, Colette… and that’s before we even get to the royal romps queening up our screens. At least Can You Ever Forgive Me? brings a lifestory to the cinema which isn’t too familiar to audiences outside literary America. It’s based on the autobiography of a professional biographer, Lee Israel, who made her living writing about people like Katherine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead before coming a cropper on an unauthorised account of Estée Lauder and ending up broke and desperate. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Barbara Sukowa won Best Actress at Cannes in 1986 for her title role in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, and the power of her performance looks every bit as engaging and insistent today. A century after Luxemburg’s death (she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15 1919, her body then thrown into a canal), as her significance and influence as a political figure attracts new attention, the film deserves the handsome restoration it receives here in StudioCanal’s “Vintage World Cinema” strand; particularly – remarkable though it may seem, even given von Trotta’s rather neglected Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) dresses as a woman while dancing with her gentlewomen in her private quarters. Straining credibility, Mary is even tolerant when, on her wedding night, Darnley takes Rizzio to bed instead of her. She responds, a day or two later, by thumping his chest so hard that he angrily Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stan & Ollie unfolds mostly during Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s 1953 British concert tour, when the boys were on their last legs as a comedy act – Hardy was physically spent – but still showing flashes of their old genius. The lure of the tour, according to Jeff Pope’s screenplay, was to raise industry interest in a Robin Hood film to have starred the duo. The script for it has been written and revised by Laurel, but his red-phone-box calls to the producer, one Harold Miffin, have been ignored.Once the tour reaches London, Laurel sets out from the Savoy hotel to call at Miffin’s office Read more ...
Owen Richards
In a telling scene midway through Colette, our lead is told that rather than get used to marriage, it is “better to make marriage get used to you.” In this retelling of the remarkable Colette’s rise, it is evident she did much more than that; by the time she was done, all of Paris was moulded in her image, and in Keira Knightley's hands, it’s no mystery why.When we first meet Colette, she is a wide-eyed country girl caught in a whirlwind romance with Paris lothario Henry Gauthier-Villars, better known by his penname Willy (Dominic West, pictured below). He’s full of bombast and opinion, never Read more ...
Owen Richards
If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent. However, coherence does not mean it's good. Is the film as bad as some are making out? Well, yes and no.We meet Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek, completely at one with the great one) working at Heathrow Airport, all buck teeth and flamboyant outfits. But he’s not yet the confident Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s not for nothing that Alfonso Cuarón’s mercurial CV includes Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, because this director really knows something about alchemy. His last, the Oscar-winning Gravity, was a science fiction spectacular made oddly intimate by its focus on a lone astronaut in the expanse of space; his latest concerns the travails of a domestic worker in Mexico City, and is a family story with the visual expression of an epic. That versatility and facility are the domain of a master filmmaker. And the glorious Roma may well be Cuarón’s best yet. The Mexican’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Right Stuff ended with the conclusion of America’s Mercury space programme in 1963, and First Man neatly picks up the baton by taking us through the ensuing Gemini and Apollo missions, peaking with the “giant leap for mankind” of Apollo 11.First Man plots Armstrong’s progress from test pilot to astronaut with all the training and preparation that entailed, though fans of the earlier film may find themselves missing its comic, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This should have been the perfect match. Saudi-born director Haifaa al-Mansour earned real acclaim for her 2012 debut film Wadjda, whose 12-year-old central character had to break the conventions of a restrictive society to realise her dream – owning her own bicycle. The challenges facing the eponymous heroine of al-Mansour’s new film may have been of a somewhat different order – to live as an independent woman in her early 19th century literary world, along with the right to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, written when she was just 18, under her own name. But the two stories share a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about biopics of poets. The activity of writing is most often, after all, anything but cinematic, unless its moments of creativity are forced, while the “myth” of the poet all too easily becomes stereotypical. The very first scene of Portugese director Vicente Alves do Ó’s Al Berto suggests a heavy dose of tragédia to come: what else do you expect from a line like “All men whose eyes are too sad are poets”, delivered by a mysterious woman – Dietrich, eat your heart out – who infuses it with a glorious nocturnal mystery?So it’s something of a Read more ...
mark.kidel
So much of Japan can be lost in translation, and yet the West is fascinated by a culture that articulates the possibilities of belief and being in such a different mode than our own. Paul Schrader’s now classic 1985 film on the writer and actor Yukio Mishima explores this universe through the lens of a remarkable life – a man who was as much drawn to the philosophies of Nietzsche and D’Annunzio as he was to the art, literature and customs of traditional Japan.The film has a character all of its own, and features stunningly reconstructed extracts from some of Mishima ‘s key novels to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth. A black-and-white silent movie about the silent era itself, starring Dujardin alongside Hazanavicius's wife and frequent collaborator Bérénice Bejo, The Artist Read more ...