Steve

Godmothered

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Eleanor and Mackenzie in the snow

Godmothered is Disney product. Written to a Disney template, cast, directed, lit and edited in an efficient business-like Disney way, it’s a comedy fairytale that popped off the production line and onto screens wrapped up all nicely and ready to go. Its story even resembles an existing Disney film, Enchanted, the one about a fairytale character having a fish out of water experience in New York – comedy, romance, the full nine yards. We’re in Boston this time, snow-encrusted, twinkly, Christmasy Boston, where magic is about to happen when klutzy trainee godmother Eleanor (Jillian Bell) arrives on an “assignment” to help out the little girl who wrote to her asking for help. Should … Read more

Mank

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Herman Mankiewicz at work in bed

Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the other about director Orson Welles doing Mankiewicz out of a screen credit for his work. Inserted almost as an afterthought is yet another story – about the socialist Upton Sinclair and his campaign to become governor of California, and how his guns were spiked by the movie studios. Installed at a secluded cabin in the Mojave desert with … Read more

Black Bear

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Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott

Aubrey Plaza fans, here’s your film. In Black Bear she plays one, two, three or even four roles, depending on how you’re counting, as an actor/director trying to hash out a screenplay out in a cabin in the woods. From the first instant that Allison (Plaza) arrives at this B&B “for creatives”, as owners Blair (Sarah Gadon) and Gabe (Christopher Abbott) put it, it’s obvious there’s going to be trouble. She, a self-declared “difficult” actress who went into directing because no on would employ her any more, immediately starts that bantering, joshing to and fro with host Gabe which indicates that she fancies him. As they walk up from the main gate, he … Read more

Mogul Mowgli

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Zed in hospital gown

Mogul Mowgli jumps into debates about authenticity and cultural appropriation – often conducted by people with no skin in the game on behalf of people who do – and does a decent job of trying to make itself heard above the din of the culture war. It does it by focusing on the particular rather than the general in a story about a rapper who gets sick and ends up in hospital, where, stripped of what he thinks of as his identity, he starts to wonder who he is. His family, meanwhile, gather about and try (in authenticity/appropriation style) to impose their idea of who he is on him. Riz Ahmed plays rapper … Read more

Run

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Sarah Paulson and Kiera Allen

She can’t. Run, that is, one of the little jokes that director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty has with the audience in this two-hander about a mother, her wheelchair-using daughter and the young woman’s impending flight from the family home to university. Another joke is what a great mother Diane (Sarah Paulson) is. She’s home-schooled her daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen), feeds her with vegetables grown (organically, surely) in their very own garden, the better to ensure that Chloe grows up big and strong. Except that isn’t Chloe’s fate. She’s been born with a range of problems – asthma, diabetes, a blood condition and paralysis from the waist down – but she’s a smart and resourceful kid … Read more

The Match Factory Girl

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Aarne and Iris dancing

The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki was already a critical success when he had his first hit (in cult terms), 1989’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, a road movie about a fictional Russian rock band on tour. The Match Factory Girl came a year later. It was neither as commercially or critically successful, in spite of Roger Ebert’s raves. It looks like something of an intellectual and artistic exercise – storytelling pared back to the absolute minimum – dialogue, lighting, acting style, ambient sound and music compressed and compressed again until there’s no fat left to lose. Its short running time (one hour nine minutes) made it difficult to categorise and a hard sell for … Read more

Barbara

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Barbara on her bicycle

By the time Christian Petzold made Barbara in 2012, enough time had passed for his film not to be seen as just the latest in a line of Ostalgia movies (2003’s Good Bye Lenin! is a prime example). In any case the German writer and director tends to be more concerned with the problems created by freedom rather than a lack of it. Films misty-eyed for the communist era aren’t really his thing. However, Barbara does have some generous things to say about life in the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) wrapped up in a thriller about a woman trying to escape to the West. Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a doctor in … Read more

Wolfsburg

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Benno Fürmann and Nina Hoss

Wolfsburg. The title is a bit of a joke, a reference to the city/state in Germany where Volkswagen is headquartered. The fact that there’s not a single VW in the film suggesting that either the lawyers prevailed or writer/director Christian Petzold decided he’d said enough already with his automotively flavoured title. Because the film is about a car salesman (Benno Fürmann) out on the open road who, while fishing around for his phone on the floor of his classic NSU Ro 80, knocks a boy off his bicycle. Philipp doesn’t pull over to see if the inert figure is OK, partly because he’s in shock, partly because he’s a coward. Though by the … Read more

The State I Am In

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Jeanne and Heinrich in bed

Christian Petzold was 40 when he made The State I Am In (Die Innere Sicherheit in the original German) in 2000. Which means he’d have been in his mid-teens and at his most impressionable when the Baader Meinhof and Red Army Faction were at their most active. So-called left-wing terrorists whose main beef was that West Germany wasn’t dealing adequately with its Nazi legacy, the Baader/RAF big moment came in 1977 when they kidnapped and shot the German businessman, politician and former SS officer Hanns Martin Schleyer. Petzold and co-writer/mentor Harun Farocki make two imaginative leaps from this historical starting point. The first suggests what might have happened to two such terrorists not … Read more

Fatima

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The children see the Virgin

In many ways a bog-standard bible flick given a cursory wipeover with a humanist rag in the figure of Harvey Keitel – doing penance for Bad Lieutenant all those years ago – Fatima is just dramatic enough, lavish enough and well directed enough to escape the “it is what it is” label. But first a bit of background for those not schooled in Catholic lore. During the First World War the Virgin Mary appears to three peasant Portuguese children who live in the village of Fatima, not once but several times. A cult grows up around the children, who report back on the Virgin’s latest utterances to the growing crowds, and eventually Mary … Read more