Steve

I’m Your Woman

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Jean with new baby

I’m Your Woman starts with a series of wham-bam events that prompt the question: “what is that all about?” A man arrives home and gives his wife a baby she’s clearly never seen before in a “there you are, get on with it” kind of way. In the next scene, a gang of men all arrive at the house that Eddie (Bill Heck) shares with Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) + new unexplained baby. Who are they? Eddie suddenly goes missing. Why? A guy called Cal (Arinzé Kene) turns up, gives Jean a big bag of money and spirits her (+ new unexplained baby) off to a hideout. We have no idea what’s going on … Read more

Herself

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Celebrating the build

Phyllida Lloyd is most often described as the director of Mama Mia! but there’s a lot more to her than that. Take Herself, the latest in a line of strongly female-centred productions, including the Mrs Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the all-female Shakespeare productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest at the Donmar Theatre in London, which drew raves from the critics, wild applause from audiences and loud harrumphs from the gammons. The Shakespeares all gave top billing to Harriet Walter, and meaty roles to Clare Dunne. Here, Dunne is thrust into the lead (well, she did co-write) and Walter is a gracious supporting star in a story about one … Read more

Blithe Spirit (1945)

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Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford and Constance Cummings

“How the hell did you fuck up the best thing I ever did?” Noel Coward famously asked director David Lean when he first saw the film version of Blithe Spirit, a play that had wowed London in 1941 and went on to do the same on Broadway. We’re now often told the film – a relative flop on its first release – is a classic. It isn’t, but certain elements of it remain quite special, most obviously Margaret Rutherford, who steals the film with a performance of batshit comic gurning so dazzling that the film flags whenever she’s not on stage… set, whatever. “Just photograph it, dear boy” was Coward’s instruction to Lean, … Read more

Minari

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David with his dad Jacob out in the fields

Minari is an old-school film of the sort you used to see at Sundance a lot, gentle character driven dramas full of people who were essentially decent. The sort of film Robert Redford used to direct, like Ordinary People or The Milagro Bean Field War or A River Runs Through It (which starred Brad Pitt, an exec producer here). It did well there, winning both the Grand Jury and Audience awards. In the dying days of the Donald Trump administration it asks and answers the question: who built America? The answer is immigrants, though that message is never uttered out loud. Instead we follow a Korean family who’ve moved out from the city … Read more

Ammonite

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Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet

After a few years of doing mostly voice work on animations, Kate Winslet has been coaxed back into a leading role in Ammonite, the follow-up to Francis Lee’s powerful breakthrough debut as a director, God’s Own Country. The 2017 movie told the story of forbidden love between two men on the wild and windy moors of Yorkshire. It’s tempting to see Ammonite as a remake – forbidden love on the wild and windy shores of Dorset – but is there more going on here than that? Winslet plays real-life 18th-century fossil-hunter Mary Anning – a huge Wikipedia page on her awaits if you know nothing about her. To boil it down: she lived in … Read more

Never Rarely Sometimes Always

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Autumn and Skylar in a clinic waiting room

On absolutely no account to be confused with Sometimes Always Never, a dazzling tiny film starring Bill Nighy and written by the brilliant Frank Cottrell Boyce, Never Rarely Sometimes Always does actually share a couple of things with its near namesake – it’s a drama driven by relationships between people and has great performances by its leads. It could so easily, in hands other than those of writer/director Eliza Bittman, not have been, since it’s a film “about” abortion. Abortion dramas tend to be issue-y. Here, instead, Bittman stays as far back as she can while still engaging. This is primarly a film about the friendship between two young women. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) … Read more

Queen of Hearts

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Anne and Gustav on a bed

What to expect of a film with the title Queen of Hearts? Well it stars Trine Dyrholm, an actor who guarantees a certain level of quality. English speaking audiences might remember her for films like Nico, 1988, in which she played the tragic junkie and onetime singer with the Velvet Underground, or alongside Pierce Brosnan in Love Is All You Need, a romantic drama for grown-ups. She also took a key role in the excellent TV series The Legacy, a tale of poisonous family dynamics, some episodes of which were directed by May el-Toukhy, who’s in charge here too. Though she can prettty much do it all from high drama to low comedy, … Read more

The Orphanage (2019)

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Qodrat and Hasib on a motorbike

The Orphanage is about life in an orphanage, no shock there, but what makes it fascinating is that it’s an orphanage in Afghanistan in the late 1980s while it was under Soviet rule. Director Shahrbanoo Sadat’s film is based on her friend Anwar Hashimi’s unpublished 800-page diaries, which also inspired her previous film, Wolf and Sheep, the first film ever brought to Cannes by a female Afghan director. A further three instalments of what will ultimately be a pentalogy are planned, so Sadat clearly has faith in the source material. Qodratollah Qadiri, also a holdover from Wolf and Sheep, plays a hustling street kid in Kabul who is picked up one day by … Read more

Host

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The Zoom call begins to go wrong

Host is the perfect pandemic horror movie. Shot entirely on Zoom, it features a menacing presence that’s out there… somewhere… and a bunch of mates who are communicating with each other lockdown-style via laptop/phone/tablet. Expanding a short that went viral and gave director/co-writer Rob Savage an in with Shudder, who financed the film, it takes the glitches and irritations of the Zoom call and puts them to work dramatically. Realism is everything here and Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd have kept in the stuff that makes a Zoom call a Zoom call. So, the scratty getting-going moments, when one person is online but another isn’t, the terrible sound of a headset microphone … Read more

Away

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The creature lurks while the boy hangs from a parachute cord

Fresh out of college and with no tempting job offers, Latvian arts graduate Gints Zilbalodis decided to start work on an animation. Away is the result, a remarkable film – and all from one man’s bedroom (and imagination). Zilbalodis was 24 when he started on his three-and-a-half-year marathon and didn’t just do all the animation we see in the finished result – he pretty much did everything else too, production, editing, sound, music the lot. Think of the scrolling hundreds of names you see in the credits in a typical animation and marvel. It’s obvious from the opening shot that something good is going on. A young man hangs from a blasted tree … Read more