Spain
Adam Sweeting
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few liberties with the facts (not least a wholly invented episode with a pro-German Irish spy), but Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden and based on Ben Macintyre’s book about the event, mostly plays it with a doggedly straight bat.This is more of a behind-the-scenes howdunnit than a big-bang war movie, and could function credibly as a stage Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Almodóvar has rarely returned to the petrified Spain of his youth, flinging off Franco’s oppression by ignoring it in his early films of freewheeling provocation, where anarchic, hot freedom was all of the law. In this sober tale of secrets and lies, though, his nation’s past is literally dug up.Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer living a chic Madrid life, but the village where she was raised is still haunted by the Fascist murder of her great-grandfather and others. Dishy forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde) agrees to help find the bodies, and in elegantly edited elisions we Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mamma Mia! hovers unhelpfully over every frame of Off the Rails, a road movie of sorts in which three women make a music-fueled pilgrimage to Mallorca to honour the wishes of a fourth friend, who has died before time of cancer.The difference here is that the scenery keeps changing and the music of choice isn't ABBA but Blondie. And while no one would cite Mamma Mia! as a paragon of writing for our time, it at least makes sense within the particular world it describes. That's more than one can say for this collaboration between Jordan Waller (screenwriter) and Jules Williamson (director), Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“Forgotten We’ll Be”), more literally catches the mood of the writer’s tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and prominent social reformer who was murdered by paramilitaries in his native town of Medellin in 1987.The writer realised that, two decades after his father’s death, his achievements were starting to be forgotten, even in close Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, this year’s musical Christmas arrived at the Wigmore not in a dazzle of joyful light and bedecked with winter greenery, but with a lonely band of singers facing the gloom of an unlit, empty hall as fear and confusion multiplied outside. In both of yesterday’s concerts, the closing events of the venue’s defiant and courageous autumn season, a cappella choral music from the Renaissance ushered in a festival more austere than ecstatic. It proved deeply beautiful in its sombre way, but quite free of tinsel jollity. Black-clad singers on a bare stage, surrounded by cavernous Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Salvador Dalí’s house at Portlligat on the Costa Brava is straight out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine, its sunbaked white walls dazzling in the sunshine, and light pouring in from every angle. It was a fisherman’s hut when Dalí moved there in 1930, extending it over 40 years like “a true biological structure” to make a home and a place to work for himself and his wife Gala, with every window letting in a view of the sea.The house is one point of the Dalí Triangle: another is the Gala Dalí Castle at Púbol, not far from Girona (pictured below right). Dalí moved here after the death of his Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A documentary about six middle-aged Antipodeans, four women and two men, walking the 500 mile pilgrims’ path through France and Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela sounds uplifting, inspiring, even fun. Just the ticket, perhaps, when one's travel horizons are limited. But this soft-focus film fails to dig deeply enough into the lives and motivations of strangers thrown together with nothing much in common apart from grief, and sometimes not even that.Other film-makers have tackled the Camino de Santiago: Luis Bunuel’s surreal The Milky Way in 1969, Emilio Estevez’s The Way, Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
The scenes at flamenco legend Camarón de la Isla’s chaotic, thronged funeral which open this lovingly-made documentary give some idea of the singer’s popularity and the shock at his death at the age of just 41 in 1992. He began singing professionally – to support the family after his blacksmith dad’s early demise – at just eight years old and was profoundly influenced by his mother, Juana Cruz Castro, a basket weaver who attracted admiring crowds to hear her sing in her Cadiz courtyard. So far, so gitano.Camarón (meaning shrimp – he was considered pale and blonde among the gypsy community) Read more ...
Owen Richards
Horror has always been a good vehicle for satire, from John Carpenter’s They Live to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Some metaphors opt for the subtle precision of a surgical knife, and others the hit you over the head. The Platform on Netflix is the latter, a brutal, blunt and effective sledgehammer.The concept is straight from a high school philosophy allegory. A vertical prison, with two cellmates per level. At the very top, a lavish feast is prepared on a platform every day. It passes through every level, inmates desperately eating their fill before it lowers down. The further down you are, the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This lovely, contemplative Cannes prize-winner has something to teach us in testing times. Filmed in director Oliver Laxe’s grandparents’ Galician village, it observes convicted arsonist Amador’s return from jail to the fire-prone landscape he’s blamed for devastating. This is slow cinema, smouldering with hurt but attentive to beauty and kindness, as Amador settles back into rural rhythms and his elderly, stoic mum’s care.The land, lush and sodden early on, has a painterly palette, and Laxe drinks in its supernal sights. A great bridge appears spindly between mountains, mum Benedicta hides Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In common with her literary forebear, Joanna Trollope’s light hand refrains from the introverted angst so common in contemporary novels. Her immensely readable, witty renderings of English middle-class life have entertained and enlightened over almost two dozen novels. She portrays characters on journeys for which they’re missing the map and exposes common dilemmas along the way. Her characters search for answers to situations obscured by habit and solutions to personal problems they hardly recognise. Her underlying optimism is alluring – from recognition may come change.In Mum & Dad Read more ...