Month: April 2021

Sound of Metal

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Ruben at the drum kt

Sometimes a film gets up a head of steam that’s inexplicable. Sound of Metal is one such film, garlanded in critical buzz, a Twitter favourite and six Oscar nominations, only one of which I understand. Perhaps it’s the actor, perhaps it’s the story. This is Riz Ahmed’s moment. Having been remarkable since coming to prominence in the Michael Winterbottom film Road to Guantanamo in 2005, Ahmed has been blisteringly good in one thing after another (The Night Of, The Sisters Brothers, Mogul Mowgli to name but three). He’s again remarkable here, as Ruben, the drummer in a metal duo suddenly losing his hearing. One moment it’s crystal clear, the next it’s about three … Read more

Shiva Baby

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Danielle at the buffet

Shiva Baby is a failure-to-launch comedy of aspirational anxiety and adds writer/director Emma Seligman’s name to the list of 1980s-born New York(ish) women working the seam – Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig and Desiree Akhavan. Seligman adds her own distinctive twist, though, a genre switcheroo as screwball comedy morphs into something darker and tenser, an almost Hitchcock-y vibe emerging as main focus Danielle (Rachel Sennott) works herself into terrible situations entirely of her own making. What’s more impressive is that the action takes place all on one set, inside the house where a shiva (the Jewish wake/mourning period) is taking place after the death of someone – the obligated Danielle isn’t actually sure who – … Read more

Midnight Sky

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George Clooney and Caolinn Springall in Arctic gear

Midnight Sky continues George Clooney’s fascination for sci-fi, a rocky relationship that’s only really yielded one proper old fashioned hit – Gravity. Both Solaris and Tomorrowland seemed to fall into the dark hole between reviewer favourite and audience hit. Unbowed, Clooney plugs on, directing here, and trying something rather bold as he attempts to weld the thoughtful meditative mood of Solaris to the gut-churning action dynamics of Gravity, a bold and some might say doomed endeavour. The postmodern futurism of Tomorrowland is nowhere to be seen. The action takes place out in space and here on Earth – out there is a ship returning from scoping out a new planet to colonise, down here … Read more

Throw Down

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Tony and the bouncer square off

Johnnie To’s baffling Throw Down, from 2004, is a hell of a good-looking film. It’s a homage to Akira Kurosawa a dedication at the end tells us – “the greatest film-maker”. And though you might find influences from the great Japanese director, who had died only six years before, you’ll search in vain for coherent storytelling, one of Kurosawa’s strengths. What the hell is going on, in other words. Three characters who have little obvious connection band together: Sze-To (Louis Ko), the drunken manager of a Hong Kong nightclub; Tony (Aaron Kwok), a figure of wild impetuosity who wants to fight everybody; and Mona (Cherrie Ying), a skank living on her wits, doing and … Read more

Lovers Rock

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At the party

Lovers Rock is the second in the sequence of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series of films for the BBC, stories from the frontline of the West Indian immigrant experience in the UK. Unlike its predecessor, Mangrove, which featured Letitia Wright, and Red, White and Blue, its successor, which starred John Boyega, Lovers Rock is not speckled with big names and would be bent out of shape if it were. It’s a “day in the life” kind of affair, bookended by Martha (Amarah-Jae St Aubyn) climbing out of her bedroom window on a Saturday evening and eventually winding up back in her bed just in time for her mother to bang on her door … Read more

Days

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Non and Kang in a cafe

“This film is intentionally unsubtitled”, it says at the beginning of Days (aka Rizi), the latest feature from the amazingly productive Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang – 19 films of various lengths in the last decade. Fans will be delighted to hear it’s more of the same – a virtually wordless film composed of not much more than a double handful of static shots, with only two actors in it, one of them the Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng, the other a newcomer, Anong Houngheuangsy. True to form Tsai hits us with a very long opening shot, of a man (Lee) sitting and watching a storm raging, before cutting, eventually to the same man lying … Read more

Frankie

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Isabelle Huppert as Frankie

Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more

Bad Trip

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Chris and Bud screaming

Bad Trip is Borat revisited. Same basic idea – pranks being foisted on real people, with a bit of scripted dramatic infill (a story) connecting the gotchas together. The pranks are all standalones, one-offs, which explains that no matter how short this sort of film is (the two Borat movies and Bad Trip all come in at a sober 90 minutes-ish), they always feel a bit too long. But is Bad Trip funny is surely the only important question? The answer is that, yes, it is. I went into laugh-out-loud vocalising at about 15 minutes in and erupted frequently right up to the final moments. The plot is a string of spider silk caught … Read more

The Reckoning

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Grace with a gun

Contagion, hysteria, conspiracy and the patriarchy – you can’t accuse British horror film The Reckoning of not being on the money, even though it was shot in Hungary in 2019 while the Sars-Cov2 virus was still getting its boots on. Patriarchy is its biggest concern, though, or one 17th-century woman’s plucky fight against it. Charlotte Kirk both co-wrote and stars as Grace, the hot widow whose looks earn her the unwelcome attention of the local squire (Steven Waddington), who’s already dispatched her husband with plague-spiked ale and now – out of bitter spite at being sexually rebuffed – has accused her of being a witch. Visually and tonally we’re in the realm of the … Read more

Siberia

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Clint and an Inuit man out in the snow

Abel Ferrara’s 2019 film Siberia wasn’t shot in Siberia, unlike the 2018 film of the same name starring Keanu Reeves, which was. Ferrara now lives in Rome and so, needing snowy wastes to tell a story about a remote bar-owner’s journey into his own psyche, he starts and ends his film in the Italian Tyrol, where the white drifts of winter snow pass muster. The film is based on Carl Jung’s Red Book, which was a full-blown surrender to his own unconscious mind in the wake of his split with fellow psychoanlyst Sigmund Freud. Though he worked by day, gave lectures and saw patients, by night Jung just let it all go, letting … Read more