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And so, Lucky, a gigantically ironic title for a film about a woman being stalked night after night in her own home. It stars Brea Grant, who also wrote it, and until recently I’d not heard of her. But there she was just a few weeks back in After Midnight, Jeremy Gardner’s cute, smart, smallscale … Read more
Strange film, Moffie. As if Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket had been crossed with Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, the brutal training discipline of the former with the shimmering lust-in-the-dust poetics of the latter. But first the first – it’s 1981, we’re in South Africa, and the apartheid regime, not content with waging war at home, … Read more
Better Days is a Chinese film about love, bullying, suicide, rape and murder… but mostly love. Adapted from a Young Adult novel (by Xi Jiuyue), it uses the relationship between a prim high school girl and a thug from the wrong side of the tracks as its skeleton key to access other, more off-limits areas … Read more
I started out watching So Pretty convinced it was “not for me” but by the time it had finished I wondered if I was precisely its target audience. Me? Gammon-faced guy whose exposure to trans culture extends about as far as an evening in Soho’s (London) infamous drag bar Madame JoJo’s once, quite a while … Read more
Apples makes clear that, even in 2021, the Greek Weird Wave continues to roll. A retro-scifi story of a world afflicted by an illness that robs people of their memories, it stars Aris Servetalis as Aris (handy), a man who leaves his home one day and then, suddenly, is sitting on the bus unable to … Read more
You’d have thought that the silent The Three Musketeers from 1921 would be the first film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel but it wasn’t. Depending on how you count these things it was around the seventh or eighth film version since 1903. It wasn’t even the first of 1921. That honour went to a French … Read more
The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was … Read more
It doesn’t take much exposure to TV talent shows to realise that success with the voting audience or expert panel isn’t so much about the performance and talent as about the story the contestant tells. Teen Spirit takes that idea, the story, and turns it into a story of its own. In what could almost … Read more
Made in Italy feels like it’s based on one of the books by Peter Mayle, the British advertising executive who tired of the life and lit out for France, where he set about writing lighthearted sun-dredged reports on his new life. A Year in Provence was the first and it sold very well. That became … Read more
Scrappy but powerful, Blue Story is also known as the film that got briefly banned by some UK cinema chains, because some people going to see it were arriving armed to the teeth. “Blue Story, a violent gangster movie, made by the BBC,” is how one British newspaper, never happier than when playing the race … Read more
Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary is called The Kingmaker but it looks at first glance like nothing more than a film about a woman whose days in the sun are long behind her. Greenfield you may remember as the director of The Queen of Versailles, a film about a trophy wife of a very rarefied sort. … Read more
Finished in time for the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese in 1997, restored in 2017 as yet more waves of protest against that regime convulsed its streets, Made in Hong Kong is as much a celebration of the city’s energy as it is the guts-or-glory story of one of its … Read more
