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While scrolling through a list of “100 Best Film Noirs of All Time” I was struck by Detour. Number 10 on a list that kicked off with In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep and The Third Man (so, not one of those mad lists), it stood out because I’d not … Read more
French writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve genuflects before the master, Ingmar Bergman, in her playful and reverential drama set on Fårö (pronounced foe-rer, more or less), the island where Bergman wrote and shot some of his films, and which is now dedicated to promoting his legacy. In meta fashion, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony are a pair … Read more
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné) was the first feature Mia Hansen-Løve made, in 2007, when she was about 25/26. It’s an interesting debut and sets the tone for a career built on small, carefully crafted human-relationship dramas going for the slow burn rather than the big melodramatic bang. The Nordic name is a bit … Read more
A deeply ironic title, Welcome to Chechnya is a documentary about the treatment of homosexuals in the Chechen Republic, a largely Islamic part of the world which fought for its independence against Russia in two wars in the 1990s and is now embroiled in a culture war over LGBT rights. Chechnya is a country where … Read more
Briskly and directly, much like its heroine, Hemel gets straight down to business with an opening scene of two people naked and rolling around, the woman mocking the man’s penis – you’re no David and it’s hardly Goliath etc – as part of an extended bout of cockteasing foreplay. Hemel – it means Heaven in … Read more
Talk about burying the lead. The Last Duel submerges its true story – the rape of a woman in 14th-century France – inside a story about the man who did it and her husband, his friend. We get the duel, the joust, up front, so we know from the outset where this adaptation of a true … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
