peter sarsgaard

The Bride!

by
Jessie Buckley as the Bride

Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath. To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with … Read more

September 5

by
Close up of John Magaro

Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more

Memory

by
Sylvia and Saul in profile

There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film. It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be … Read more

Human Capital

by
Quint and Drew face off

First-world and real-world problems collide in Human Capital, which started life as an American novel, became an Italian movie (Il capitale umano) in 2013 and then returned to the US in 2019 for this English-language version. How best to describe all three? Bonfire of the Vanities meets The Ice Storm will about do it. In other words a broad spectrum portrait of modern life, with a narrow focus critique of the elite at its core. It starts, as Bonfire of the Vanities did, with a car accident, and then plays and replays the story from the point of view of each of the characters involved. Not the same events, exactly, but a “how … Read more

Lovelace

by
Peter Sarsgaard and Amanda Seyfried in Lovelace

Amanda Seyfried has a spectacular rack and, gents, you get plenty of it in this biopic about Linda Lovelace the 1970s deep throat queen who unwittingly did more than most to make porn legit. Amanda Seyfried… rack… unwittingly. Those are the key words from that sentence and of this film, a well made, deeply period piece that would have us believe that it’s on the side of the unwitting, naïve Bronx Catholic girl born Linda Boreman – who went on to become the star of Deep Throat, the first porn film to screen in mainstream theatres – while all the time devoting 90 per cent of screen time, and 99 per cent of dramatic … Read more