drama
Owen Richards
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival. Surely by beating Bong Joon-Ho, Celine Sciamma and Ken Loach, the film would stand up to scrutiny?The titular Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, pictured above right) is an introspective teenager, thoroughly devoted to his imam’s strict interpretation of the Qu’ran. Both his Muslim Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Gavin O’Connor has made a career out of sturdy films that make grown men cry. His best was Warrior - a hulking, tear-jerking tale of male fragility and addiction. His latest Finding The Way Back is a potent, raw drama that explores similar terrain and reunites him with Ben Affleck (they last worked together on The Accountant).This film was initially called The Has-Been. Like a stage-actor hearing the word "Macbeth", the average Hollywood actor might recoil at such a title. Which is a shame, as it encapsulates the sense of loss experienced by the central character Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. At under an hour and a half, Boulifa shows a gift for economic storytelling, but that doesn’t mean it comes without an emotional wallop. The story centres on two twenty-something mothers who have been best friends since school. Lynn is played by street-cast actress Roxanne Scrimshaw, who makes a startling debut, and Lucy by Nichola Burley (Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights), who delivers at Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years. First came the TV series in 2012, starring Eddie Redmayne and Clémence Poésy; then there was Sir Trevor Nunn’s 2010 stage production for the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. This new digital Birdsong coincides with the anniversary as well, but otherwise it’s quite unlike the others – and, indeed, unlike any other pre-pandemic play.The effort to produce a socially distanced show must have been monumental. Brought together in less than six weeks, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom. The wife of rural policeman Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) was driving, and the mystery of her death and open, infinite wound of their love consumes him during the course of this gripping dissection of damaged masculinity and desperate devotion.Ingimundur’s relationship with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, unsentimentally superb, pictured below) just about anchors him in the present. So too does his affectionate Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Ten years in the making, Thomas Clay’s third feature, starring Charles Dance and Maxine Peake, is a remarkable and potent example of genre-splicing British independent filmmaking. The story opens in 1657. Cromwell is in power and, on a small, fog-bound farmstead in Shropshire, lives put-upon housewife Fanny Lye (Peake). Her much older husband John (Dance) is a bible-bashing brute who, with cane-whip frequently in hand, rules over the lives of Fanny and that of their child Arthur (young talent Zak Adams) with puritanical zeal. Their simple life is turned upside down by a young couple Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The master of crowd-pleasing comedy, Judd Apatow, returns with another on-brand tale of arrested development with The King of Staten Island. While it's near his signature anarchic charm, this comedy-drama shows that even a veteran director/writer/producer like Apatow has room for growth. Perhaps Apatow's development is down to his collaboration with 26-year-old SNL comedian and Staten Island native Pete Davidson, who combines his writing and acting talents to explore how he came to terms with losing his firefighter father during 9/11. Set in the working-class world of Staten Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s impossible to deny the sincerity with which Todd Robinson has approached the true story of William H. Pitsenbarger, a US Air Force Pararescueman who was killed in action while rescuing over 60 injured soldiers during one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Vietnam war. The set-up is familiar for films of this ilk. Sebastian Stan is Scott Huffman, a cynical Capitol Hill careerist in the Department of Defence who gets landed with a job he doesn’t want. Whilst trying to climb the political ladder he’s cornered by a Vietnam vet (William Hurt), who asks him to get his fallen comrade Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Nisha Ganatra’s musical dramedy, penned by first time screenwriter Flora Greeson, isn’t going to win any prizes for originality and is almost unforgivably corny. But the feel-good vibes and winning combination of Tracee Ellis Ross and Dakota Johnson are still likely to win audiences over.Ross has been acting since the mid-90s, but has experienced a low-key renaissance in recent years, partly due to her role in Kenya Barris’ award-winning show, Black-ish. Of course, being the daughter of Motown legend Diana Ross and top music exec Robert Ellis Silberstein, she knows the music biz through and Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like Rams before it, the ice-glazed hillsides and stark ochre grasslands of northern Iceland are the backdrop for Grímur Hákonarson’s third feature The County, a rural drama that explores the murkier side of local politics.Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) is a middle-aged, tough-as-nails dairy farmer. She’s grieving for her late husband who recently committed suicide, jack-knifing his truck into a ravine. We later discover he ended his life because of punishing debts owed to a corrupt cooperative that dominates the local farming community. This leaves Igna running the farm near Dalsmynni alone Read more ...