Hollywood
Nick Hasted
Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich, deepening milieu. Director Wes Ball again offers serious sf, just as much as Dune, considering the consequences of another species’ dominance, and outraged humanity’s resistance.We are unspecified centuries after Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with Caesar’s reign now a font of vaguely remembered ape faith. Human civilisation – and its weaponry – has fallen away, leaving a green world, with mysterious skyscraper skylines sheathed in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.There was a pro forma feeling to the roll call of winners under host Jimmy Kimmel's eye that saw, across nearly 3.5 hours, Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, and Robert Downey Jr win as best director, actor, and supporting actor, respectively – all prizes they had been expected to take.The same was true of Da'Vine Joy Randolph's supporting actress nod as Mary Lamb, the grieving cafeteria manager in Read more ...
James Saynor
The Iron Claw is the sort of solid, mid-market Hollywood “programmer” that is often said to no longer exist on the big screen, and this family saga set in the world of Texas wrestling certainly has the feel of a museum piece. Many have warmed to it, perhaps for that nostalgic reason. American sports movies tend to do poorly in overseas markets, so it’s a little surprising that this one has the prominent involvement of BBC Film. It tells the true-ish story of Fritz and Doris Von Erich and four of their sons, who entertained the public with their tight-trunked slaprobatics in the 1970s and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As the 117 minutes of Wonka tick by, the question it poses gains momentum: who is this film actually for? Children of all ages?It’s an “origins” story, standard now for all manner of film character, showing the sunnier side of Roald Dahl’s eccentric chocolatier, and how his magical chocolate factory came into being. This Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is more elfin than goblin, a lovable chap with looks to set teenage girls swooning. It has a love story of a kind in it, but not the type that sets young teeth a-grinding. It’s essentially a comedy, with Britain’s sitcom finest popping up like wack-a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-disc, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Arrow release reveals many memorable virtues, alongside surprising inertia and superficiality.Blackhat applies Mann’s great film intelligence and capacity for research to early cyber-crime, gleaning the apocalyptic consequences of malignant zeroes and ones. Rendering a keyboard transparent so he can shoot its hammering Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used to elicit emotional responses in his movies' audiences, as Cousins cuts rapidly from one memorable excerpt to another. Quite a feat since Hitchcock died 43 years ago.The conceit mostly works well thanks to the unseen Alistair McGowan’s impersonation of Hitchcock. Insinuating and sardonic (not least in his fleeting observations about the speeded-up Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The prologue to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie augurs well. A gaggle of young girls in a rocky desert are playing with doll-babies while enacting the mind-numbing drudgery of the early 20th century housewife. Then a new godhead arrives, a giant pretty blonde whose stilettoed feet turn slightly inwards. The girls go into a frenzy of old-doll-smashing, Also Sprach Zarathustra swells up and one girl throws her doll high in the air.But that’s more or less it for the oldster cinephiles in the audience. Still to come is a “Proust Barbie”, plus chatter about cognitive dissonance and existentialism, as you Read more ...
Justine Elias
Searching for a coherent narrative thread in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is probably futile, so it’s best to begin with the movie’s nervy central performance by Laura Dern in multiple, overlapping roles as “a woman in trouble” – the movie’s subtitle. Or maybe many different women in all manner of trouble. In one timeline, Dern plays a battered but defiant drifter, fighting back against years of abuse. In another, she’s an American actress at work on a Southern-fried melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows. That movie-within-a-movie’s smarmy Read more ...
Justine Elias
Superhero movies are the nearest equivalent to American holiday parades: they come along with noisy, bright regularity, and crowds either flock to them, many eager persons deep along the sidewalk, or flee to quieter neighbourhoods.The Flash, yet another foray in the DC Comics Universe (the one that contains Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman) is extraordinary only for the pre-release bad press surrounding its star, Ezra Miller, who after brushes with the law in the US and Iceland, announced that they are seeking psychiatric care.As a movie, The Flash turns out to be a mix of adequate, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are a few perils to saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as Janette Manrara discovered on this opening night of Disney’s anniversary arena jaunt. Trying to divide the Glasgow crowd into sections to sing the song, Manrara tripped over who was to sing what, something only notable because the rest of the evening was possessed of an almost overpowering slickness.Although the opening overture went all the way back to Steamboat Willie, nearly all of the set, which featured a full orchestra, a rotating array of singers supplied from the West End and a likeable, cheerful hostess in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Everything Everywhere All at Once lived up to its title Sunday night at the 95th Academy Awards by managing to win nearly everything everywhere almost all at once. The fragmented, seriocomic celluloid head trip won seven of the 11 Oscars for which it had been nominated, entering record books several times over not least for having two Asian actors amongst the recipients.“This is history in the making,” said Michelle Yeoh, the Malaysian actress sounding overcome as she triumphed as Best Actress in a tight race with Cate Blanchett, in career-best form in Tár. Blanchett’s chances were possibly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Babylon is sensational, a manic, pounding assault on the senses meant to convey Hollywood’s chaotic birth. Damien Chazelle’s return to La La Land’s showbiz dreams forsakes ineffable intimacy for hysterical thunder, and for much of the time that’s enough.It’s 1926, with Hollywood growing in LA’s backwater at America’s wild western edge. We start with an elephant shitting in a truck, en route to a party where that will count as decorous subtlety. Inside the party’s mansion doors, frenetic camerawork explores packed, deep-focus frames, embodying a seething, orgiastic crowd. Chinese-American Read more ...