Jack Lowden

Tornado

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Little Sugar holds a knife to Tornado's throat

Samurai swords in Scotland in the 1700s. Like his debut, Slow West, John Maclean’s follow-up Tornado is a grand chase movie held together by not much at all. In this case a simple plot about a young Japanese woman on the run from some vagabonds who want their gold back. Simple stuff. Akira Kurosawa is in here, so is Sergio Leone. It’s very elemental. Archetypal, you could say, an arthouse western in an unlikely setting. What the men chasing Tornado (Kōki) don’t fully understand is how skilled this slip of a girl is when it comes to wielding a honed blade, but they will, when they back her into a corner in the … Read more

Benediction

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Young Siegfried in his room

Terence Davies struggled to raise the finance for Benediction, as he does so often with his films. There’s no multiplex demand for Emily Dickinson (subject of his last feature, 2016’s A Quiet Passion) or Edith Wharton (2000’s The House of Mirth), he’s told, and in any case the uncompromising Davies isn’t the sort of writer/director to meet audiences halfway with explication-heavy dialogue. Producers and money men take fright. And yet, every time a new Davies movie does finally make it to the screen, it turns out that there is an audience for it, the people who have some idea who this modernist poet was, or that infamous writer, or want to know more. … Read more