The Roads Not Taken

Leo leans on Molly's shoulder

For middle aged people wondering what the hell happened to the great life they were going to have, where the hell it all went wrong, The Roads Not Taken is your film, but don’t come to it expecting uplift. Javier Bardem plays Leo, a guy living a life of extreme misery in New York. Floored by what might be a stroke, he needs help to do the most basic everyday things and gets it mostly from his devoted daughter (Elle Fanning), who matter of factly sorts out Leo when he pisses his pants at the dentist and then loses her job because caring for dad has been taking up too much of her … Read more

A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks with camera

HBO’s documentary A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks does a great service for ignoramuses (like me) who mistakenly had Parks pegged as the guy who directed Shaft and a few other films and maybe dabbled in photojournalism earlier in this life. He was so much more. Born in 1912, Gordon Parks came of age as the Depression was taking hold and by his own admission (in archive interview footage) would probably have lived the life of the career criminal/hustler if he hadn’t become fascinated by some photographs in a magazine and picked up a camera. Parks had real talent and was a hard worker and by the end of the 1930s … Read more

The Humans

The family sit down to dinner

The Humans started life as an Off Broadway show, won rave reviews and was soon on Broadway itself, where it won even more, picking up a Tony and a Pulitzer nomination on the way. Not bad for an old school “small” play with a cast of six and a simple, non-shocking premise – a family meets for Thanksgiving, has an evening together and then disperses. What people picked up on, and it’s also there in this screen transfer, is the subtext of shakily uncertain times, which translates into a kind of individual anxiety in its characters that’s hard to put a finger on. Jayne Houdyshell is the only one to survive the transition … Read more

Titane

Alexia draped across a car

How to approach Titane, Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her bold debut Raw, without entering spoiler territory? It’s not so much a story as an exercise in shock reveals, of inappropriateness and transgression, delivered in the sort of cine-literate style that gets festival juries salivating. It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. What can be said is that it starts off soberly enough, with a man driving with his daughter in the back of the car. Alexia is humming loudly, to Dad’s irritation. She makes things worse by kicking the back of his seat. Then she unhooks her seatbelt, causing him to swivel round from the front and… disaster. Alexia winds up in hospital, … Read more

Snakehead

Dai Mah and Sister Tse talk

Brilliant individual moments don’t always combine to make a brilliant movie. Snakehead is a case in point. A New York crime drama with Taxi Driver levels of ambition, it’s slickly made and very well acted but just doesn’t cohere as a drama. It’s a true story, or so it says, about a young Taiwanese woman (Shuya Chang) smuggled into the USA by a snakehead (people smuggler). The journey costs her $57,000, an impossible amount to pay off, but she sets about trying to clear the debt by working her way up the criminal network run by Dai Mah (Jade Wu), Chinatown big wheel and crime queenpin. Mah has fingers in many pies and … Read more

Zeros and Ones

Ethan Hawke as JJ the soldier

Zeros and Ones starts with a to-camera introduction by Ethan Hawke expressing how honoured he feels to be working with director/writer Abel Ferrara. After namechecking Willem Dafoe, who’s been Ferrara’s go-to for the past few years, and asserting that an actor’s greatest gift (a well known actor, he means) is being able to champion talent, he reaches forward and clicks the switch on the camera to the off position. The movie proper starts. This gush is all written by Ferrara, of course, as is the concluding epilogue Hawke also delivers, just the first instance of Ferrara messing with the mind of his audience, which isn’t about to get an easy ride. Zeros and … Read more

Spencer

Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales

A fairytale princess is trapped inside an ogre’s castle in Spencer, “A fable from a true tragedy” a note announces at the start of director Pablo Larraín’s film following Princess Diana over three Christmas-y days stuck with the Royal Family at Sandringham. But it’s also a story about a woman driven mad by the situation around her, gamely still fighting for independence, trying to assert that she’s also a somebody in her own right, a Spencer, not just a pretty bauble hanging off the tree of the British Royal Family. The story takes place at Sandringham over Christmas where the Firm all assemble annually. It’s the tenth time Diana has done the three-day … Read more

Lamb

Ingvar and Maria with the lamb

In Iceland, on a dark and stormy night near Christmas… if that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale or nativity play, prepare for Lamb, which mixes fairytale fantasticality with a bit of Christian iconography to dark Nordic effect… eventually. It’s all a bit weird and primeval, in other words, but things get off to a rather Martha Stewart-y opening as director Valdimar Jóhannsson sets his scene. A solitary house out in the Icelandic back of beyond, rustically chic, where jumper-wearing couple Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) farm by day and share evenings together in companionable silence. They’re happy. Maybe. Something about the way Jóhannsson keeps cutting away to the looks in … Read more

Rage

Doctor Holliford checks Dan while son Chris lies on a bed

George C Scott, as well as acting, also directed three films. Rage, the second, was the first to get a theatrical release and is an interesting failure, unlike Scott’s first film, The Andersonville Trial, which was a critical hit. Scott’s last, The Savage Is Loose, tickled neither audiences nor critics – it was probably the theme of incest. The fascinating thing about Rage is that it’s a conspiracy thriller with a plot that’s all about the US government conspiring against its own people. This was 1972, pre-Watergate, when mainstream US-set conspiracy thrillers generally still hinged either on malevolent foreigners hatching dastardly plots (The Manchurian Candidate) or rogue generals planning a coup (Seven Days … Read more

Unclenching the Fists

Ada and Akim take on a motorbike

Unclenching the Fists could so easily be poverty porn but manages not to be, thanks to an ending offering a sliver of salvation, and a look that’s deliberately trying to avoid the charge that this is just another in a very long series of films using poor people to tell the same story over and over again – it’s tough at the bottom. We’re in Ossetia, one of those regions that were all but subsumed by the old USSR but seem to be having a revival in the post-Communist era. Even so, it’s a poor place, and the town where Kira Kovalenko’s film is set sits in a ravine where it’s hemmed in … Read more