George MacKay

The End

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Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Son (George MacKay)

Here’s a pitch. A film about an oligarch family living in a bunker for 25 years… done as a musical! The End is Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his two documentaries about the genocidal regime in Indonesia, and should at least win awards for audacious change of direction. Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence both marked him out as a special talent, but those were both now ten-plus years ago and in the decade since he’s directed a couple of episodes of TV and nothing else. The End is both a return to film-making as well as a shift into fiction. According to the man himself, what he wanted to do … Read more

Femme

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Preston and Jules in a car together

Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and … Read more

The Beast aka La Bête

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Gabrielle and Louis in 1910

Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) isn’t the first adaptation of Henry James’s novella 1903 The Beast in the Jungle. It’s not even the first one of 2023. That honour goes to Patric Chiha’s French-language movie The Beast in the Jungle, which made it to the screens about six months before Bonello’s. Whether Bonello trimmed his sails having seen Chiha’s fascinating and underloved film is doubtful. The Beast looks like the vision of a man who’d already decided to take Henry James and put him through an extreme wash followed by a rigorous spin. James’s story has lost its original shape in Bonello’s version, which flips the genders for a start, and casts … Read more

True History of the Kelly Gang

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A topless George MacKay as Ned Kelly

You’d have thought that Ned Kelly would be an ideal fit with the movies – a glamorous outlaw, a rebel son of immigrants who fought the law (and the law won), a proto-superhero who had his own outfit, if you count a plate-steel suit as an outfit. And yet, of the modern versions (there are older, mostly lost-in-time versions going back as far as 1906), none quite hits the spot. The Mick Jagger one, from 1970, suffers from Mick Jagger being in it. The Heath Ledger one, from 2003, presented Kelly as a saint and so made him boring. And now True History of the Kelly Gang from 2019, a Justin Kurzel movie and … Read more

Nuclear

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Emilia Jones, George MacKay

After His House and A Dim Valley, Nuclear is the third film with an uneasy supernatural element that I’ve seen in the last three days. All three use the otherworldly element to put a spin on a familiar genre – two/three genres in the case of Nuclear. The first is a family drama. Mother (as the imdb calls her, and played by Sienna Guillory) gets a formidable kicking as the film opens, from her son (Brother, as per the imdb, played by Oliver Coopersmith), is rescued by her daughter Emma (Emilia Jones) and driven off into the middle of nowhere, mum to recuperate, Emma to marshal her forces before moving on to who … Read more