film directors
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a crowded trolleybus and his guilty hunt for what becomes a murder weapon provide the narrative, and sharp-featured young Mifune’s coiled performance, alternating mimed grace with feline fierceness, is the arrow carrying it to its bruising conclusion.Kurosawa and Mifune are still defined in the West by Rashomon and Seven Samurai, breakthrough Fifties Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.Soderbergh’s elliptical editing proffers a gradual, jigsaw portrait in scenes of parental boozing, rival siblings and Rebecca’s legal laxity. Chloe is meanwhile Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years preceding his death this week show the loneliness of his vision in his medium’s conformist capital, which he nevertheless adored. “It’s kind of a trick in the light [that] is magical,” he said of his adopted hometown’s allure. “It gives you the indication that anything is possible. It’s critical for me to feel that light.”Mulholland Drive’s opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.”Pablo Larraín’s Maria completes his trilogy of films about famous and charismatic women at critical moments in their lives, the others being Jackie Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) and Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021). It picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from festival showings and its American release.This isn’t the easiest moment in history to be launching a film exploring its author’s Jewish heritage, thanks to the violent repercussions of events in the Middle East, but the historical baggage that comes with that heritage is all part of Eisenberg’s theme. Set to an eloquent and frequently melancholy Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Saskia BaronAnoraBetween the TemplesIo CapitanoDahomeyEmilia PerezGreen BorderIo CapitanoMonsterA Normal ManSoundtrack to a Coup d’EtatThe usual perverse list unfolds. Two beautifully made and thought-provoking films about emigration, an intermittently brilliant exploration of attitudes to disfigurement, a helter-skelter drama about a sex worker, a Jewish romance that everyone I recommended it to hated, two post-colonial documentaries made with extraordinary skill, a heart-stopping childhood drama. and the first opera to be made about a trans drug baron. Sorry to leave out Hit Man, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Patriotic Italian films set during the Fascist war effort are understandably rare UK releases. Submarine commander Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) was, though, an honourable warrior-poet who director Edoardo De Angelis seeks to separate from wider currents.Roaming the Atlantic in October 1940, his lone wolf sub Comandante Cappellini sank a Belgian merchant ship during an exchange of fire. Contravening orders, maritime law and morality made him take 26 survivors onto his cramped vessel and sail them to neutral waters, staying on the surface and exposed to attack.De Angelis introduces Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly apocalyptic crisis. Farcically human, they pocket hors d’oeuvres, flirt and pull rank, lose tempers and trousers. Meanwhile red flames lick the sky, a HAL-like sex chatbot commandeers comms, and the excavation of “bog men” - primeval leaders castrated, bound and buried by disgruntled constituents - serves as ominous warning of their power’s precarity Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rachel Yoder says she wrote her debut novel Nightbitch as a reaction to Donald Trump’s first term as President, with what she saw as its consequent mood-shift in America towards “traditional values and women staying home, taking care of the kids.”It’s presumably safe to assume that the second coming of the Donald has not filled her with glee, but she can at least console herself that the combination of director Marielle Heller and star Amy Adams have delivered a sizzling screen version of her book.Adams’s Mother – the key characters are called by their roles rather than their names – is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...