Category Archives: Film

Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle

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This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.

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Playing to win: are Mattel movies about to take over Hollywood?

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The toy company has recruited Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig and Tom Hanks to help usher in a new slate of films based on kids’ favourites

Deep down, everyone wishes they were Marvel. Armed with nothing but B-grade IP and heroic levels of pluck, a lowly comic book company slowly went about wrestling the film industry into an inescapable stranglehold. But a decade and a half on, Marvel has become the established order. It is time for a new plucky upstart to stage another revolution. That upstart?

Mattel. You know, Mattel. The toy people. No, really.

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Flee: inside the film about a Kabul boy who finds happiness, cats and a husband in Denmark

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He escaped death, fled across the Baltic, and eventually found love and a new life. Jonas Poher Rasmussen describes how he turned Amin’s often harrowing story into an uplifting, award-winning animation

When the Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15, an Afghan refugee moved to his small village. Rumours circulated about how the boy, Amin, had got there. Some said he had walked all the way from Kabul, others that he had seen his whole family slaughtered. Rasmussen became the newcomer’s friend and confidant – Amin even came out to him as gay when they were teenagers – and their closeness endured into adulthood. When they both suffered bad break-ups in their 20s, for instance, Rasmussen went to stay with Amin; they refer to that period now as “the heartbreak summer”. He still didn’t know the truth about how his friend came to Denmark, though, so he did what any documentarist might do: he proposed making a film about him. Amin refused to reveal his identity on screen – but what if the film were animated?

The result is Flee, which alternates between scenes of Rasmussen interviewing his friend, dramatisations of Amin’s perilous journey to Copenhagen via Moscow, and present-day interludes showing him househunting with his boyfriend in which the concept of settling down presents unique challenges for someone who has spent his life running. Aside from the occasional excerpt of archive footage – the war-scarred streets of Kabul, the unruly waves seen from a boat smuggling people across the Baltic – every frame of the movie is animated, most of it in a simple, straightforwardly realistic fashion that matches Amin’s narration.

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Glasshouse review – dreamy dystopian horror with a Picnic at Hanging Rock vibe

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A mother and her daughters hole up in a Victorian conservatory, hiding from a devastating pandemic that lays waste to human memory

Shot in a Victorian hothouse in South Africa with a mixed cast of local actors and the odd imported Brit – including Jessica Alexander, soon be seen in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid – this tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet) which imagines a family of survivors hiding out in the title’s botanical conservatory after a pandemic has ravaged most of the world’s population.

The invisible threat here is an airborne virus called “the shred” which wipes out memories and leaves its victims in a bestial state, unable to remember even their own names. A matriarchal woman known only as Mother (Adrienne Pearce) guides her three female progeny – cautious Evie (Anja Taljaard), dreamy Bee (Alexander) and adolescent Daisy (Kitty Harris), alongside shred-infected brother Gabe (Brent Vermeulen) – by teaching them how to garden (they have to pollinate the plants themselves because the bees are all gone), to read, paint, and pass on the stories of the Before Times.

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‘I grew up with Branagh in Belfast: our childhoods haunt his new film’

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The director’s first cousin Martin Hamilton tells of family and the Troubles that went on to inspire an acclaimed memoir

There is one man with very personal reasons for finding the scenes of sectarian intimidation in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s film homage to his home city particularly haunting – his first cousin, Martin Hamilton.

Hamilton, who grew up with Branagh and his family in inner-city north Belfast, says the images of Catholic families being forced out of the mainly Protestant district brought back painful memories of his own fractured friendships that were lost in the Troubles.

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Butt of the joke: Bette Midler fires back at West Virginia governor Jim Justice

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Actor and activist says ‘dog’s ass would make a better governor’ after State of the State speech stunt goes viral

Bette Midler had harsh words for the governor of West Virginia after he showed his dog’s backside at the end of his State of the State speech, in a bizarre rejoinder to the actor, singer and activist.

Responding on Thursday to a tweet in which Midler called West Virginia “poor, illiterate and strung out”, the Republican Jim Justice said she could kiss his dog’s “hiney”.

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The return of Jackass: ‘It’s never not funny to see someone get hit in the nuts’

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Paramedics at the ready! Ten years after their last bone-crunching outing, the juvenile daredevils are at it again

The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.

When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.

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Kiefer Sutherland: ‘I said: I can do a really good Donald Sutherland for half the money’

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Answering readers’ questions, the actor and musician talks about how he tried stealing a job off his father, his favourite item from Greggs and his Mickey Mouse tattoo

Hi, Keith … What’s your favourite English expression? ClassicMacGruber

I’m sure they meant to say Kief? Or maybe not? I get called Kief in England more than any other place. I met some young parents in about 2001 who had named their son Kiefer, but I’ve never met anyone called Kiefer that is my age. As for my favourite British expression, there’s “bit and bobs”, which is really sweet and reminds me of my grandma, and “Oi!” which is not technically British, but any time I go “Oi!” it stops the room.

Does your twin sister have as many middle names as you? emzsam

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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ‘may fuel dangerous Holocaust fallacies’

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John Boyne’s story is used by more than a third of teachers in England in lessons on the Nazi genocide, a study found

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas may “perpetuate a number of dangerous inaccuracies and fallacies” when used in teaching young people about the Holocaust, an academic report has said.

According to research by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London, more than a third of teachers in England use the bestselling book and film adaptation in lessons on the Nazi genocide.

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Parallel Mothers review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Pedro Almodóvar’s poetic conviction and creative fluidity flow through this moving baby-swap drama about two single mothers and buried secrets from the Spanish civil war

Not parallel actually: that would mean they don’t touch. Here we have convergent mothers; intersecting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, which audaciously draws a line between love, sex, the passionate courage of single mothers, the meaning of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster and the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past. Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie has the warmth and the grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age (something starring Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine maybe, with music by Max Steiner) and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap.

As ever with Almodóvar, there are gorgeously designed interiors with fierce, thick blocks of Mondrian colour, huge closeups of the female leads and overhead shots of food preparation. It’s impossible to watch this film without just feeling grateful that its director is still so fluent, so creative, still making us a gift of these films. There is a lot going on here, and perhaps the emotions and thoughts spill over the edges of its narrative form. But it would be obtuse not to let yourself travel downstream on this film’s emotional surge.

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South review – startling filmed record of Shackleton’s gruelling Antarctic odyssey

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Frank Hurley’s 1919 silent footage turns Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition into a travelogue with cute penguins

Pioneering Australian photographer and film-maker Frank Hurley was the official witness to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition attempting to cross the Antarctic landmass, which lasted three years from 1914 to 1917. For most of the time the crew were utterly cut off from news of the outside world and the expedition became an epic ordeal when, on the way there, their ship (aptly named Endurance) was crushed and sunk by pack ice. Shackleton and his men were forced to journey onwards in a lifeboat in the desolate cold, finally to South Georgia, then rescued and brought by a Chilean vessel to the harbour in Valparaíso where they were accorded a hero’s welcome.

This 1919 silent movie is Hurley’s filmed record of Shackleton’s voyage and what is startling about it is its weird tonal obtuseness: so often it feels like a home-movie travelogue in which the mood is bafflingly jaunty. Towards the end of the film, just at the point when their lives have been saved and disaster averted, the film spends about 10 minutes on the adorable behaviour of the penguins. This is at the moment when Shackleton’s victory was said to consist simply in his heroic survival, the expedition itself having, of course, been a failure, but the film simply sets aside the obvious poignant or tragic dimension.

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China’s go-to English bad guy Kevin Lee: ‘I’m happy to play a villain’

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The English actor, who has worked with Chinese directors from Jackie Chan to Zhang Yimou, reveals how a chance meeting at the visa office in Beijing changed his life

If the Chinese film industry needs a stock foreign villain, I’m their first port of call. I was a Gatling gun-wielding mercenary in 2015’s Wolf Warrior, one of the first of the new wave of military blockbusters, and a hitman in Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu Yoga in 2017, among many others. And I recently played an American colonel in the Korean war in The Battle at Lake Changjin, the most expensive and successful Chinese film ever: it made $909m (£675m) last year.

It’s surreal – coming from humble beginnings in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire – to find myself in the middle of a massive field in Hubei province filming the likes of The Battle at Lake Changjin. You’d think you were in a real-life warzone – there were hundreds of tanks supplied by the government. I grew up watching Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee and Jet Li movies, which kickstarted my passion for China. I originally came here to study martial arts in 2004. Then I came back 10 years later to work as a financial consultant, which I didn’t really enjoy.

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Emily the Criminal review – Aubrey Plaza charges taut thriller

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A gig worker turns to credit card fraud in a tense debut feature with an electrifying central performance

It’s hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but stress. A seemingly inescapable student loan is gathering interest by the day. A couple of minor, years-back criminal charges have closed off a world of employment. It’s a familiar predicament that plagues many in America and even though first-time writer-director John Patton Ford might only show it in the broadest of strokes, it’s an effectively infuriating set-up.

When Emily is offered an opportunity for an extra income, she nervously inches down the rabbit hole. It starts off simple. She’s given a cloned credit card and has to buy a TV. She then takes it to her new bosses and gets paid $200. It’s easier than she anticipated and soon she’s doing it on the regular, edging closer to taskmaster Youcef (Theo Rossi) who slowly becomes more than her mentor. But how far is she willing to go?

Emily the Criminal is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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Taming the Garden review – fascinating study of a billionaire’s destructive folly

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Salomé Jashi’s film follows the journey of hundreds of mature trees as they are uprooted across Georgia to populate a rich man’s garden

Like a sad, greedy king in some fairytale or parable, the Georgian billionaire and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili set out, six years ago, to buy and uproot hundreds of magnificent mature trees and transport them at colossal expense and difficulty across Georgia to be transplanted in his own huge private garden. It sometimes involves taking a tree by water, along the Black Sea coast – a truly surreal image.

Salomé Jashi’s fascinating and deadpan film shows, in a series of tableau-type shots, the effect that these purchases are having up and down the land. Local workers squabble among themselves at the dangerous, strenuous, but nonetheless lucrative job of digging them up. The landowners and communities brood on the sizeable sums of money they are getting paid and Ivanishvili’s promises that roads will also be built. But at the moment of truth, they are desolate when the Faustian bargain must be settled and the huge, ugly haulage trucks come to take their trees away in giant “pots” of earth, as if part of their natural soul is being confiscated. (Surely at least some of these trees will have died en route, although this is not revealed.)

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Peter Dinklage criticises Disney for ‘backwards’ remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

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Actor who has a form of dwarfism says the studio’s pride in casting a Latina Snow White is undercut by stereotypes retained elsewhere

Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage has taken aim at Disney for what he called its “fucking backwards” forthcoming live action adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Dinklage, who stars in Joe Wright’s new film, Cyrano, accused the studio of double standards by attending to racial diversity in its cast but falling back on other damaging stereotypes.

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Palm Trees and Power Lines review – an unnerving, remarkable debut

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The first feature from Jamie Dack, about a relationship between a 34-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, boasts a breakout performance for newcomer Lily McInerny

Palm Trees and Power Lines, a remarkably sharp-eyed and bruising debut from writer-director Jamie Dack, opens in the distended, languid stretch of a teenage summer. Lea, played in a stunning first turn by newcomer Lily McInerny, is 17 years old and bored. She lives with her single mother, harried and yearning Sandra (Gretchen Mol), somewhere in small-town, coastal California – palm trees and power lines, railroad tracks and modest homes – and floats through the days with sunbathing, YouTube makeup tutorials, and trips to the cheap ice cream chain store with her lustful best friend Amber (Quinn Frankel).

Lots of films mistake glamorizing and maturing adolescence for capturing it, but Dack’s feature, developed from her 2018 short of the same name, is saturated with the teenage. The actors are fresh-faced and gangly, and Dack has a keen ear for the vacuity and experimental crudeness of teenage conversations – boys ranking girls they know on a 10-point scale, girls playing along to hang, fart jokes, generally talking about nothing. Lea spends a good portion of the first 15 minutes prone – on the ground, on the floor with Amber, on the couch, on a lounge chair, in the backseat of someone’s car during passionless sex with a clueless boy – and the camera is there with her, on her level, hemmed by the smallness of her world.

Palm Trees and Power Lines is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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Sharp Stick review – Lena Dunham’s comeback is a misjudged experiment

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The Girls co-creator’s first feature since 2011 on a 26-year-old’s sexual awakening has flashes of brilliance but is hobbled by infantilization

Ever since Hannah Horvath, the unfocused twentysomething protagonist of the HBO series Girls, declared herself the voice of a generation, audiences have struggled to read Lena Dunham. The line was clearly at least half-ironic, a joke, but many took it at face value, indicative of Dunham’s aspirations as both a writer and public figure. Dunham has provoked, fairly and unfairly, intense reactions since Girls, which she created with Jenni Konner, put her on the map in 2012, at 25; her solid artistic instincts – go back and watch the pre-MeToo sixth season episode American Bitch, which shreds the double-edged flattery of the self-important male artist – are often accompanied by baffling foot-in-mouth moments along lines of race, class, gender, and plain old overexposure.

Sharp Stick, Dunham’s first film since her breakout feature Tiny Furniture in 2011, isn’t likely to help that reputation. This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

Sharp Stick is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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From Billy Elliot to Spider-Man: how Tom Holland won the world’s heart

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The British actor’s ascent to Hollywood stardom via gymnastics and dance was not always a given

Tom Holland was obsessed with Spider-Man as a boy. Growing up in Kingston upon Thames, he came to own more than 30 Spider-Man costumes and cherished his Spider-Man bedsheets.

And, unlike for most, his childhood obsession paid dividends later in life: he would eventually get to play his hero, landing the role that has made him the most famous young British actor in the world.

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Liborio review – fascinating account of a true-life Dominican folk hero

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A faith healer in the Dominican Republic falls foul of the US in this arresting, ambiguous drama

Here’s a striking and mysterious debut from the Dominican Republic, where film-maker Nino Martínez Sosa recounts a fascinating true-life story of occupation and resistance from the turn of the last century. Olivorio Mateo was a peasant and faith healer who became known to his disciples as Papa Liborio; he built a self-sufficient community in the mountains. But when US forces occupied in the 1910s, Liborio was branded a bandit, and killed.

Not that you’d know any of the historical facts from watching this, which is set squarely in the arthouse endurance-test genre: there is little to no scene-setting or explainers, with the kind of pacing often euphemistically described by critics as “deliberate”. It begins after Liborio vanishes from his village during a hurricane, presumed dead. When he is found alive, he claims to have returned from God with healing powers and takes a band of followers up into the mountains.

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