Month: February 2021

Savage State

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The family in the drawing room

Savage State is a western in French. Just that fact makes this film, also known as L’état sauvage, unusual and worth a watch. Is that enough though? Not quite, but as with Frenchness so with the rest of its many idiosyncrasies. This is a strangely bland film packed with unusual and often pungent elements. The setting for one. We’re in the teeth of the American Civil War, but rather than being on one side or another we’re with the neutrals, the French settlers ordered from afar by Napoleon III to take no part in the conflict. Early scenes establish a frontier setting of double-cross and gunfights, contraband and big characters, in particular the … Read more

Malmkrog (Manor House)

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The cast of Malmkrog outside in the snow

Some films you can watch while you’re checking your email or skimming Twitter. Malmkrog (aka Manor House) is emphatically not one of those films. It requires your full attention, but rewards the focus if you’re interested in what it has to say. At 3hrs 21mins it’s a long film too, so gird your loins, put on the blinkers, quit the mail app and submit. It’s divided into chapters, each one with the name of one of its five main protagonists, a gaggle of the Russian elite who we catch having a drink before lunch, eating lunch itself, taking afternoon tea, sitting down to dinner and then enjoying an after-dinner brandy. Tough life. Around … Read more

Breaking Fast

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Haaz Sleiman and Michael Cassidy

Can you be gay and a devout Muslim? Breaking Fast wrestles with that problem in, yes, an issue-driven drama tangling with concepts that rarely get an airing. The title stems from the practice of breaking the dawn-to-dusk fast required of committed Muslims during Ramadan. What fasting actually means seems to vary depending on many factors, but for Mo (Haaz Sleiman) it comes down to no food, no drink and no impure thoughts. Mo is gay and out and a Muslim, one who takes his religious observances seriously. As we’re introduced to him and his partner Hassan (Patrick Sabongui), they’re in the teeth of a crisis. Hassan is not out and is currently hyper-ventilating … Read more

This Is My Desire

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Jude Akuwudike as Mofe

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – to borrow a phrase often credited to John Lennon – is the movie This Is My Desire (aka Eyimofe) distilled down to an essence. Told in distinct chapters subtitled Spain and Italy, it follows two denizens of Lagos, Nigeria, and dives into their lives while they wait for the passports and paperwork that will allow them to seek a better life elsewhere. First up, Mofe, and in the film’s opening shot – a tangle of wires bursting like mattress stuffing from an ancient electrical junction box – a metaphor for the whole film. Messy, potentially dangerous, lives lived hugger-mugger in a … Read more

Wolfwalkers

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Wolfwalker Mebh with wolves

Kings of Irish animation Cartoon Saloon bring their Irish Folklore Trilogy to a close with Wolfwalkers, a rousing big finish after The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014). It’s closer in spirit to Song of the Sea, which was about a shapeshifting sea creature known as a selkie, than Kells, which was set in an Irish monastery where enthusiasm, bizarrely, was shown to trump actual craft and learning when it came to illuminating ancient manuscripts. This time, co-writer/director duo Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart have repurposed an old legend about “wolf men” from Kilkenny, where their studio is based, to tell the story of human beings who release their … Read more

I Am Toxic

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Fini Bocchino with a gun

If you’d never seen a modern zombie film (ie something made since George Romero relaunched the genre in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead), the Argentinian film I Am Toxic would be a good place to start. It’s a distillation, a jus, of all the elements you might expect to see, with none of the flim-flam. A man (Esteban Prol) wakes up among a loose pile of bones and bodies. He’s surprised he’s alive. He hauls himself upright and blunders off in a daze, striking out across the scorched earth in the harsh sun. It’s a post-apocalyptic world and he’s a survivor in it, this we know because we’ve seen a lot … Read more

Our Friend

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Jason Segel and Dakota Johnson

I’m not sure who the audience for terminal disease weepies is. Not me, for sure. But Our Friend is a remarkably good one. When we die, or as we die, the highs and lows of the life just lived end up being tallied. That’s what this film does, taking particular account of one high that would have passed unnoticed if something really bad hadn’t come along. The high is Jason Segel as the titular Friend, the something really bad is the cancer diagnosis that Nicole (Dakota Johnson) receives. The action actually snakes back and forth through 14 years of the relationship between Nicole and her husband Matt (Casey Affleck) but it’s the diagnosis … Read more

News of the World

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Helena Zengel and Tom Hanks

British readers wondering why Tom Hanks is starring in a film about a defunct Rupert Murdoch newspaper – fondly known as The News of the Screws, because of its interest in kiss-and-tell stories – wonder no more. This western is called News of the World because that is the name of the novel it’s based on, by American writer Paulette Jiles. Simple as. The film version is immediately reassuring on three counts. First, the look of it as it opens, honeyed light spilling from kerosene lamps in what is obviously a Western setting – props to DP Dariusz Wolski, who for a long time has been doing great work on what often turn … Read more

Promising Young Woman

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Cassie in action

A #MeToo-fuelled drama produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company, starring Carey Mulligan and directed and written by Killing Eve’s Emerald Fennell. Promising Young Woman is full of promising young women but recently gained extra notoriety because a Variety review of the film apparently suggested that Carey Mulligan wasn’t quite hot enough to pull off the role of vengeful temptress luring drunk men to their fate. That comment was actually about Mulligan’s performance rather than her looks. But the story now has grown its own legs. Either way, an attractive young woman who is not hot enough to tempt a heterosexual man wearing several pairs of beer goggles. Pause to think about that. And … Read more

One Night in Miami

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Sam, Cassius, Malcom and Jim

What did Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Malcolm X all talk about when they met to celebrate on the night of Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston in January 1964? It’s a fascinating  question that One Night in Miami asks. The answer, in reality, is nothing, since the meeting never took place. But Kemp Powers’s  play imagined that it did, and it didn’t do the box office any harm. Now Regina King’s silky and understated direction brings it to a wider audience. Ali wasn’t called Ali back then. He was still using his birth name, Cassius Clay, a fact that boomers will already know since Ali is part of their programming. For … Read more