Tilda Swinton

Broken Flowers

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Don in his car with a bunch of pink flowers

If you’re looking for peak Bill Murray, 2005’s Broken Flowers is a strong contender. Murray himself recently said, “that was a perfect movie
 it really did happen”, (while eating spicy chicken wings on a YouTube show called First We Feast, in case you want to check that out too). It’s peak Murray because it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie, and Murray and Jarmusch are both masters of cool deadpan. But also because this is a Murray vehicle in a way even Groundhog Day cannot match. He is in every scene, the story is all about his character and though there’s obviously a gulf between the Murray we see on screen and the real one, what … Read more

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

The Eternal Daughter

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Close up of Rosalind

You get a double dose of Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter, writer/director Joanna Hogg’s “lockdown movie”, shot with a skeleton cast in a secluded Welsh hotel and making the most of the pared-down vibe. Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind, a daughter/mother duo who have come to Moel Famau Hall (as Soughton Hall has been renamed) because it used to be Rosalind’s family home decades before. There they get a not unfamiliar reception – there’s no food because it’s late and the kitchen is shut, the rooms they have booked are not free, the wi-fi is wonky and the receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies) is cool to the point of hostility. It’s all a … Read more

Asteroid City

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Scarlett Johansson in red top and matching lipstick

Welcome to Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s companion piece to The French Despatch, another film appearing to take its inspiration from yellowing adverts in ancient back issues of Life magazine to depict a world where corporate capture by Hollywood, the military-industrial complex and Madison Avenue is rendered in Anderson’s ironic deadpan – the writing, the acting, the visuals, the soundtrack all point in the same direction. The action centres on a 1950s desert waystation where a motley group of people get trapped together after a recent atom bomb test, and then get locked down (spot the pandemic) after an alien arrives and steals the asteroid that gives the area its name. Anderson’s usual collection … Read more

Three Thousand Years of Longing

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The Djinn and Alithea

The bomb of 2022 is what industry somebodies are calling Three Thousand Years of Longing. True, it didn’t do very good box office. It did terrible box office in fact. But streaming will probably claw back some of the deficit, where it’ll almost certainly be watched several times by quite a number of people. It’s that sort of film. It’s a compendium affair, always a tough sell, with no explicit throughline, the story of a narratologist (a person who studies stories to reveal truths about humanity) who finds a bottle in a bazaar while at an academic conference in Istanbul and discovers that it contains a genie, or djinn as they now tend … Read more

Memoria

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Jessica at an art gallery

Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is woken in the night by a bang. Memoria, a bizarre film which gets odder the longer it goes on, begins. What is the noise? Outside, in the dawn light, in a parking lot full of cars, one of the car alarms goes off, then another, and another, until all the car alarms are parping away. Gradually, one after another, they all fall silent again. Jessica visits a sound engineer called Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) to try and replicate the sound she heard. She visits her sister who is ill in hospital. She has a meeting at a hostel with a man who wants her to sign some papers. She’s … Read more

Suspiria

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Susie and fellow students dance

What’s the point of remaking Suspiria if you’re going to take out all the stuff that made the 1977 original so unique? Dario Argento, the director of the original, asked that question himself after he’d seen this remake – wondering, in short, “why?” – after director Luca Guadagnino’s new version debuted in 2018. There’s something in what he says. Out goes the original film’s original grand vision – its bad-trip looks – and with it goes the original story’s big idea of not revealing what was going on until the film’s dying moments. In comes a bracketing structure which introduces ChloĂ« Grace Moretz at each end of the film, for no real reason … Read more

The Souvenir: Part II

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Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie

The Souvenir: Part II makes sense of Part I, which seems like an obvious thing to say. But some sequels genuinely are sequels (The Godfather: Part II), fleshing out and adding to the original. Others are merely retellings of a story that’s already been told (The Matrix Reloaded). Joanna Hogg’s film fits into a third camp, of sequels whose purpose can only be understood as a part of a whole. Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you didn’t quite go the massive appreciative bundle on Part I, as many in the commentariat did, Part II might finally convince you. A refresher: the story is essentially Hogg’s own, of going to … Read more

The French Dispatch

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Bill Murray as the editor of the Dispatch

A middle finger to the haters, The French Dispatch finds an unrepentant Wes Anderson doubling down on the whimsy and pastiche of films like The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. There’s more. An artist’s statement, done early on in Owen Wilson’s laconic voiceover, vouchsafes that “All grand beauties withhold their deepest secrets.” Secrets? Deepest? Anderson is all surface, surely? Anyhow, on to the Dispatch, which is an American magazine/supplement of New Yorker stripe run in the old way – a liberal institution headed by a steely eccentric (played by Bill Murray), never short of money and with enough space to contain at least one writer who doesn’t write, … Read more

The Human Voice

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Tilda Swinton with axe

If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro AlmodĂłvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in 2018. There’s a Spanish language one starring Karina Gidi from 2016, a sung version from 1985 with the soprano Elisabeth Söderström as “the Woman”, even one starring Ingrid Bergman from 1966 directed by Ted Kotcheff (who also gave us Rambo in First Blood, the great Aussie shocker Wake in Fright, and ur-bozo comedy Weekend at Bernie’s). A South … Read more