Review

Zeros and Ones

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Ethan Hawke as JJ the soldier

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, he reaches forward and clicks the switch on the camera to the off position. The movie proper starts. This gush is all written by Ferrara, of course, as is the concluding epilogue Hawke also delivers, just the first instance of Ferrara messing with the mind of his audience, which isn’t about to get an easy ride. Zeros and … Read more

Spencer

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Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales

A fairytale princess is trapped inside an ogre’s castle in Spencer, “A fable from a true tragedy” a note announces at the start of director Pablo Larraín’s film following Princess Diana over three Christmas-y days stuck with the Royal Family at Sandringham. But it’s also a story about a woman driven mad by the situation around her, gamely still fighting for independence, trying to assert that she’s also a somebody in her own right, a Spencer, not just a pretty bauble hanging off the tree of the British Royal Family. The story takes place at Sandringham over Christmas where the Firm all assemble annually. It’s the tenth time Diana has done the three-day … Read more

Lamb

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Ingvar and Maria with the lamb

In Iceland, on a dark and stormy night near Christmas… if that sounds like the beginning of a fairytale or nativity play, prepare for Lamb, which mixes fairytale fantasticality with a bit of Christian iconography to dark Nordic effect… eventually. It’s all a bit weird and primeval, in other words, but things get off to a rather Martha Stewart-y opening as director Valdimar Jóhannsson sets his scene. A solitary house out in the Icelandic back of beyond, rustically chic, where jumper-wearing couple Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) farm by day and share evenings together in companionable silence. They’re happy. Maybe. Something about the way Jóhannsson keeps cutting away to the looks in … Read more

Rage

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Doctor Holliford checks Dan while son Chris lies on a bed

George C Scott, as well as acting, also directed three films. Rage, the second, was the first to get a theatrical release and is an interesting failure, unlike Scott’s first film, The Andersonville Trial, which was a critical hit. Scott’s last, The Savage Is Loose, tickled neither audiences nor critics – it was probably the theme of incest. The fascinating thing about Rage is that it’s a conspiracy thriller with a plot that’s all about the US government conspiring against its own people. This was 1972, pre-Watergate, when mainstream US-set conspiracy thrillers generally still hinged either on malevolent foreigners hatching dastardly plots (The Manchurian Candidate) or rogue generals planning a coup (Seven Days … Read more

Unclenching the Fists

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Ada and Akim take on a motorbike

Unclenching the Fists could so easily be poverty porn but manages not to be, thanks to an ending offering a sliver of salvation, and a look that’s deliberately trying to avoid the charge that this is just another in a very long series of films using poor people to tell the same story over and over again – it’s tough at the bottom. We’re in Ossetia, one of those regions that were all but subsumed by the old USSR but seem to be having a revival in the post-Communist era. Even so, it’s a poor place, and the town where Kira Kovalenko’s film is set sits in a ravine where it’s hemmed in … Read more

100 Years of… The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

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Alice Terry and Rudolph Valentino

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was the first of five films Rudolph Valentino made in 1921 and though it’s the film that made him a star he’s not the star of the film, which is an ensemble piece. The star is the film itself, an epic so complete and fine-tuned that it’s a reference point today whenever producers and directors are aiming to tell tender human stories against a background of raging conflict. It’s a big film too – two and a half hours long, which isn’t gargantuan compared to, say, Birth of a Nation (three and a quarter hours) or Greed (originally four and a half hours) – but surprises people who … Read more

Showgirls

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Nomi licks the poledancer's pole

The film that ruined a lot of careers, Showgirls has a reputation it only partially deserves (though there is that sex scene in the swimming pool). Since it debuted in 1995 it’s been a soft target for any prurient soul looking for an easy win. Look – naked women! Its actual failings are far less regularly mentioned. Sleazy, camp, sexist and so on. It’s none of these, but it does portray a sleazy, camp and sexist world in a bracingly honest way, and there are plenty of commentators with an agenda only too willing to deliberately confuse the two. It’s an A Star Is Born story, with Elizabeth Berkley as the wannabe turning up … Read more

Last Night in Soho

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Ellie takes fright

Edgar Wright, born 1974, hymns the 1960s, a decade he never saw, in Last Night in Soho, a genre mash-up and nerd’s custard with looks, style and verve to spare. Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is a shy 1960s-obsessed girl from the sticks who comes to London to study fashion. Having got off to a bad start with a gang of other students who’d be called “plastics” if this were a high school movie, Ellie takes a room with seen-it-all-dearie landlady Ms Collins (Diana Rigg). By day Ellie continues her studies, crafting bits of pink chiffon into babydoll outfits for imaginary peroxided 1960s women. But by night, in a magical meld of bodyswappiness and time … Read more

The Drummer

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Danny Glover and Sam Underwood

A typically copper-bottomed performance by Danny Glover isn’t just the making of The Drummer, it sets the tone for the entire film. He’s been doing this sort of thing for ever – long before Lethal Weapon more or less institutionalised his shtick – and here plays the Vietnam veteran who runs a drop-in centre called The Drummer, which caters for serving military personnel who want out. It’s 2007 and George W Bush has just ordered “the surge” in Iraq, and in an all-hands-on-deck move the army is sending back into the field of conflict people who really shouldn’t be there, either because they’re exhausted and have done too many tours already, or because they’re … Read more

No Time to Die

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Lashana Lynch and Daniel Craig

A remembrance of Bonds past, No Time to Die is an evocative, elegiac farewell to Daniel Craig which also feels like a goodbye to the entire franchise – the familiar “James Bond will return” is there after the end credits, in case you need reassuring. It covers a lot of ground, flicks a lot of synapses not normally flicked by a Bond movie and is fascinating from first to last. All of the Craig Bond movies have played about with the Bond formula one way or another, but No Time to Die seems to have gone one step further, as if it wants to run two Bond movies in parallel – the one we … Read more