Review

The Kingmaker

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Imelda Marcos at home

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. Imelda Marcos, subject of The Kingmaker, you might remember as another trophy wife, of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She of 3,000 pairs of shoes. Watching it I was reminded of Errol Morris’s 2013 documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, in which Morris managed to lay not a single glove on the old fox, who had absolutely no … Read more

Made in Hong Kong

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Sam Lee as Moon

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 residents. Director Fruit Chan builds out from its hero and in from its frequent cityscapes, the total effect being a portrait in the round of a time and a place. The human focus is Sam Lee, as a gangster called Mid Autumn Moon who is so low-level that his whole gangster status is moot. With his wiry physique … Read more

Boss Level

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Roy puts an opponent to the sword

For those days when you just want something entertaining – Boss Level, a new Joe Carnhan movie that gives us the familiar Carnahan formula, action plus buffoonery, delivered with a deadpan rictus by a new arrival in geri-action heroics – Frank Grillo. Grillo plays Roy Pulver, a guy who wakes up every day to the same scenario – a “machete wielding asshole” trying to kill him, followed by an encounter with a helicopter gunship, followed by a deadly explosion and a fall from a high window, after which he’s chased down city streets in fast cars by gun-toting bad guys determined to kill him. That’s if they haven’t already killed him. Because Pulver has lived … Read more

The Mauritanian

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Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster

The man at the centre of The Mauritanian, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is a real person. Wikipedia spells his last name Salahi but its facts otherwise agree pretty closely with Kevin Macdonald’s film – picked up in Mauritania, extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for years, suspected of being Al Qaeda’s chief recruiter. Was he? Macdonald earned his stripes making documentaries and went big time with Touching the Void. Since then he’s had his biggest successes with films cleaving close to the factual (The Last King of Scotland, about Uganda tyrant Idi Amin), while the more overtly fictional The Eagle (Roman legions in Scotland) and Black Sea (submarine jeopardy) caused less … Read more

And Then We Danced

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Irakli and Merab in the dance studio

The very trad meets meets the very not in And Then We Danced, a pungently flavoured drama about a wild love affair between two men who dance with the Georgian national troupe. Black Swan and Flashdance are the two most obvious points of reference, as punishing regimes take thir physical toll and rivalries for the top slot combine with a push to innovate against the dead hand of tradition, the entire raison d’etre of a troupe like the one that Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) dances in. He’s perhaps not the best, the most naturally gifted dancer in the troupe, but he’s prepared to do whatever is necessary to make the grade and get into … Read more

Favolacce (Bad Tales)

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Dennis meets Vilma

Grim and matter of fact, Favolacce follows up the D’Innocenzo brothers’ Boys Cry, a grim and matter of fact mafia drama with a tale, a bad tale (it’s also released as Bad Tales) of kids cusping on teenagerdom living in intolerable family situations. Asshole dads, toxic family relationship and cowed kids make for a film that’s tough going and yet oddly through-the-fingers watchable. Perhaps because, like frogs being gradually brought up to a simmer, we are introduced to the awfulness by stealth. To start with it looks like we’re in the world of Raymond Carver. There’s even what looks like a reference to that Carver story Why Don’t You Dance, the one about … Read more

Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint

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Two large Klint canvases

Three great abstract artists died in 1944, this revelatory German documentary from 2019 tells us. Two of them haunt the gift shops of the world’s museums of modern art: Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. The third deserves to be in there with them, according to Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint (Jenseits des Sichtbaren – Hilma af Klint) – which goes on to make an even bigger claim. That this obscure artist working in relative isolation in Sweden was not just one of the greats but the very first abstract artist, and so one of the major figures in 20th century painting. Piet and Wassily need to budge up. When MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction … Read more

Dear Comrades!

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A dead striker and a soldier

Dear Comrades! is a film about actual events that took place in the USSR in 1962, when the Soviet authorities reacted to a strike at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant by opening fire on the demonstrators. The subsequent cover-up of the massacre was so thorough that details about what had happened only started to emerge when the USSR started falling apart. Director Andrey Konchalovsky puts a personal dramatic rather than semi-documentary spin on events by opening his film up in a bedroom, where attractive middle-aged local party functionary Lyuda (Julia Vysotskaya) is pouring herself back into her clothes and discussing politics with her boss. Sharing intimacies before she heads out, it’s immediately obvious … Read more

I’m No Longer Here

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Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño as Ulises

There’s a hint of early Jim Jarmusch in I’m No Longer Here (Ya no estoy aqui originally), a spicy Mexican drama with an offbeat attitude and a strong sense of place. Early Jarmusch often featured distinctive characters floating around in a world outside their control. Stuff happens, but very little of it is at their instigation. They react to events rather than act upon them. So it is with Ulises (Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño), a creature of the barrio in Monterrey, a big fish in a small pond, a member of a loose cadet wing of a gang – everyone’s in one – who is marked out by his remarkable hairstyle, as if … Read more

Amanda

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David and Amanda

Amanda uses the Islamist terror attacks in Paris in 2015 as a springboard for a quiet drama about loss. Since the focus is resolutely on the human rather than the political, it might be a bit too quiet for some, but co-writer/director Mikhaël Hers appears to be deliberately trying to make this a case of less heat more light. Hers takes time building up his characters. Amanda (Isaure Multrier) is the shy, sweet daughter of bright, kind teacher and lone mother Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb). Sandrine’s brother, David, is a young man working two jobs and always running a bit late. Busy busy. Too busy, in fact, to take his responsibilities as an uncle … Read more