film directors
Nick Hasted
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.Sony sparked the super-boom with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), only for their reliance on related properties to hasten its end with the calamitous Morbius and Madame Web. Venom’s ace is Hardy’s unlikely double-act as gloomy, whiny journalist Eddie and his capricious beast inside’s bombastic, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
MariaHow do you solve a problem like Maria? Pablo Larrain’s film 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 have broken the highbrow barrier to become truly universal figures. It pivots around a performance from Angela Jolie which stands a chance of elevating her from a mere movie star into something approaching greatness.Larrain has invaluable support from Edward Lachman’s sumptuous cinematography, both monochrome and colour, while screenwriter Steven Knight (also the writer of Larrain’s Spencer) has been Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia.Bongela splices forgotten archives of polished propaganda, raw videotaped reality and painful conversation to understand her own racial reality, and how colonial scars can be complimentary yet invisible for black and white South Africans today. White hands are shown etching borders and conjuring flags, stamps and anthems as Bantustan “homelands” Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (Riley Dandy, pictured below), cinematographer Carissa Dorson capturing Seventies New Hollywood’s elegiac glow. Joseph has just robbed a bank in the present day, and effects an unlikely getaway through a nearby farmhouse’s previously rumbled time-portal, letting the pair hide in the past till the heat dies down.What seems a sure-fire bolthole in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination.Coppola subtitles Megalopolis “a fable”, and its tale of an imperious architect fighting venal New Rome’s Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic uses bomb-ravaged Vienna as an index of the aftermath of World War Two. It’s a city divided between the Allies and the Russians, stranded in a murky limbo between the old pre-war Europe and the divided continent that’s painfully starting to take shape. It’s a city of secrets, lies and shadows – and very haunting Expressionist-style shadows they are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.X riffed on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1976) as elderly killers stalk a 1979 Texan barnyard porn shoot, and found a haunting frisson in Mia Goth’s duel portrayal of murderous, ancient Pearl and youthful Maxine. Pearl then recast The Wizard of Oz’s Kansas prologue in a grim 1918 equivalent to Dorothy’s rustic home, Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a lot to unpick in Zoltán Fabri’s 1956 film Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta). Take leading man Imre Soós’s disarming resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, and a central love story which plays out like a Hungarian take on Romeo and Juliet with some post-war agrarian politics thrown in for good measure.Fábri keeps his narrative and thematic plates spinning brilliantly: Soós’s charismatic co-operative farmer Máté falls for Mari (a luminous Mari Törőcsik in her debut film appearance), whose father István is a stubborn private smallholder looking to expand his empire. Fábri captures a society on Read more ...
James Saynor
We’re used to dabs of colour splashing briefly across black-and-white movies – Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Coppola’s Rumble Fish spring to mind – but director Agnieszka Holland has a new and uncompromising variant on the ruse.The colour opening shot of Green Border swoops across the treetops of an emerald forest in Middle Europe, but in less than a minute the verdant image bleaches into monochrome. It never seems likely that a multi-hued continent will be back on our screen for the rest of the movie – 152 minutes of brilliant, controlled filmmaker fury – and so it proves. This Read more ...