Category Archives: Film

La Fracture review – gilets jaunes fable breaks under weight of its metaphors

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A lovelorn woman lies in a Paris hospital as violent protests rage on the streets. It’s all very symbolic … but is it any good?

The fracture of the title is, ostensibly, the nasty broken arm suffered by ditsy lead character Raf (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), a comic-book artist in Paris who slips and falls over having had a traumatic and possibly metaphorical breakup with her partner Julie (Marina Foïs). But there is another metaphor level to come.

Related: Stillwater review – fictionalised Amanda Knox drama is so bad it’s bad

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Raffaella Carrà, Italian cultural institution and LGBT icon, laid to rest in Rome

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Thousands in streets to mourn television star, actor and singer as funeral is broadcast live on TV

In Italy’s week of mourning for Raffaella Carrà, one image summed up her universal appeal: a rainbow flag – the symbol of the LGBT movement – next to her coffin in a Catholic church.

Carrà, who died on Monday aged 78, was a cultural institution in her home country, regarded as its “best-loved woman”. The queen of light entertainment TV, she also acted and topped the music charts of Europe and South America with pioneering, sex-positive pop music.

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‘I know it’s weird’ – Jumbo: the film about a woman who falls in love with a funfair ride

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Inspired by Erika Eiffel, who married the Eiffel Tower, this surreal debut tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a big, swirling fairground ride. Its director explains all

Just imagine the pitch. “I want to make my debut film about a girl who falls in love with a funfair ride. Um, that’s it.” But, however improbable it may seem, Zoé Wittock didn’t just get Jumbo bankrolled, the film was also screened at Sundance. And it’s every bit as strange, and quite a bit richer than you might expect.

Jumbo tells the story of Jeanne, played by Noémie Merlant, who lives with her sexed-up single mother near an amusement park, and also has a job there as an after-hours cleaner. One night, while spit-cleaning the knobs on a new fairground machine, Jeanne realises she has fallen in love with “him”. And so begins a giddy rites-of-passage story, with the intoxication of flashing lights and the sensuality of oil standing in for the dopamine rushes and tentative bodily exchanges of first love.

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Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston’s frontier romance: ‘She let me be more full-bodied’

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The north-eastern US is not the only uncharted territory explored in the pair’s 19th-century period drama. They discuss becoming friends, learning how to act and sexism in showbiz

After the release this year of Ammonite, with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as 19th-century fossil hunters who fall in love in inclement weather, Saturday Night Live ran a trailer featuring Carey Mulligan in a spoof version. A sombre voice heralded “two straight actresses who dare not to wear makeup” along with “Academy award-winning glance choreography … the world’s saddest flirting … and best supporting actress nominee the wind.” After promising that the stars would “round all the bases, like grazing fingers, washing carrots”, the voiceover announced: “Lesbian Period Drama. You get one a year. Make the most of it.”

Not this year you don’t. The World to Come depicts a same-sex relationship flowering in the harsh conditions of the US frontier in 1846, where timid Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and brash, flame-haired Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) drift away from their husbands (Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott) and into each other’s arms. The glancing is plentiful, the flirting desperately sad, the wind howling as if vocalising the women’s anguish. There is finger-grazing, but no carrot-washing, although the sweethearts do get to pluck a chicken together.

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Rainn Wilson: ‘I had agents who were, like: You need to get your teeth fixed, build loads of muscles’

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He may have an impressive film CV, but the actor is destined to be remembered as The Office’s resident dork. He talks about why he was perfect for the role, his new movie, Don’t Tell a Soul – and his love for Steve Coogan

Some actors associated with a signature role will tire of talking about it. No such preciousness from Rainn Wilson, who appears on camera from his Los Angeles home wearing a grey T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Scranton”. That Pennsylvania city provided the setting for the US version of the mockumentary sitcom The Office, which ran for nine widely adored, award-winning series. Wilson earned three Emmy nominations for playing the livid, disagreeable Dwight, the Rust Belt equivalent of Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth. Today’s beard and baseball cap, as well as his chipper demeanour, banishes all memory of the pasty face, DIY haircut and startled expression he wore in that show.

Wilson has starred in everything from Juno to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the Jason Statham shark thriller The Meg, but he knows that any conversation will inevitably lead back to The Office. “Dwight is the part I’m best known for and always will be,” says the 55-year-old. “And that’s fine with me.” First, though, there is his new thriller to discuss. In Don’t Tell a Soul, a cross between A Simple Plan and Paranoid Park, he plays an unassuming security guard who gives chase after encountering two teenage brothers (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Dylan Grazer) stealing from a house in rural Kentucky. During the pursuit, he plunges into a hole in the forest floor, which leaves the boys with absolute power over him. The question is not whether they will use it, but how.

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Between Two Worlds review – Juliette Binoche goes undercover in the gig economy

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Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers

Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.

In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain.

Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. Some may not.

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Dilip Kumar, Bollywood legend and ‘tragedy king’ of Indian cinema, dies aged 98

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The star was a defining figure in post-independence Indian cinema and was one of the country’s first method actors

Bollywood legend Dilip Kumar, who was a defining figure in post-independence Indian cinema, has died aged 98.

Kumar had been taken to hospital in Mumbai last week suffering breathlessness, but died early Wednesday morning. “He passed away due to prolonged illness at 7.30am,” Dr Jalil Parkar of Mumbai’s Hinduja hospital said.

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Spike Lee: ‘You hope that black people will stop being hunted down like animals’

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The director has spoken about race at the Cannes film festival, where he is the first black president of the Palme d’Or jury

Spike Lee commented on the US’s current racial justice crisis in typically forthright fashion at the Cannes film festival on Tuesday, saying he hoped the time had come that “black people will stop being hunted down like animals”.

Lee, who is the president of the jury that will pick the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, was speaking at the jury’s press conference on the first day of the festival. Having been asked a question about his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which contains a scene in which a black youth, Radio Raheem, is killed by police, Lee responded: “I wrote it in 1988. When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd murdered, lynched, I think of Radio Raheem; and you would think and hope that 30 motherfucking years later, that black people stop being hunted down like animals.”

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Richard Donner, director of Superman and The Goonies, dies aged 91

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The New York-born film-maker worked on hits ranging from The Twilight Zone to Lethal Weapon

Richard Donner, the prolific Hollywood director and producer who helmed some of the biggest hit films of the 1970s and 80s including Superman and The Goonies, has died aged 91.

Donner died on Monday, his wife, the film producer Lauren Shuler Donner, told Deadline.

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Richard Donner, master of macho blockbusters with a human touch

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Superman, Lethal Weapon, The Omen, Scrooged – the movie director’s CV tracked Hollywood’s most bankable genres from the 80s onwards

Richard Donner was the classic studio director and an action blockbuster maestro, the Michael Curtiz of the VHS age; he was the great inventor, or reinventor, of so many Hollywood genres and styles. When Hollywood invented the “franchise property”, Donner was at the centre of things. His macho Lethal Weapon movies with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover were far from enlightened on sexual politics. But they gave a black man equal billing with a white man in a top-flight Hollywood movie: rare in 1987 and rare even now.

Related: Richard Donner, director of Superman and The Goonies, dies aged 91

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Raffaella Carrà, Italian entertainment icon, dies aged 78

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Star of music, TV and film who had UK Top 10 hit in 1978 with Do It, Do It Again had been suffering an undisclosed illness

Raffaella Carrà, the pop singer and actor who was an entertainment icon in her native Italy, has died aged 78.

Her long-term partner, Sergio Iapino, announced her death, saying: “Raffaella has left us. She has gone to a better world, where her humanity, her unmistakable laugh and her extraordinary talent will shine forever.” He said she had been battling an unnamed illness for some time.

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Ewan McGregor’s 20 best movie performances – ranked!

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With his new film, The Birthday Cake, out next week, we take a look at the best roles of the Scottish actor – and no, Phantom Menace is not on it

Lip-syncing in Dennis Potter’s 1993 musical drama Lipstick on Your Collar was all very well. Crooning for real opposite Nicole Kidman, McGregor looks and sounds strained to say the least. But then his entire floundering performance represents a mere fender bump in Baz Luhrmann’s car crash of a musical. “His idea of conveying high emotion is to let his mouth hang wide open,” noted the critic Anthony Quinn.

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Last Man Standing review – Biggie and Tupac murder case reinvestigated

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Nick Broomfield returns to the deaths of the two titans of 90s gangsta rap, and the disturbing influence of record label boss Suge Knight

Nearly 20 years ago, Nick Broomfield released his sensational documentary Biggie and Tupac, in which he uncovered hidden facts about the violent deaths of US rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, and found that intimate witnesses to this murderous bicoastal feud were willing to open up to a diffident, soft-spoken Englishman in ways they never would to an American interviewer. Since then, there have been two very unedifying movies about Tupac: the sugary docu-hagiography Tupac: Resurrection (2003), produced by the late rapper’s mother, and the similarly reverential drama All Eyez on Me (2017).

Now Broomfield returns to the same subject, updating his bleak picture of the 90s rap scene, a world in which energy, creativity and radical anger were swamped with macho misogyny, drug-fuelled gangbanger paranoia and a poisonous obsession with respect. Marion “Suge” Knight, head of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, cultivated a violent gang-cult image by associating with the Bloods, and encouraged his acts and proteges to do the same, including Tupac – and Biggie’s perceived oppositional identity condemned him. But even more disturbingly, the LAPD allowed its officers to moonlight at Knight’s firm as “security” (a term that euphemistically covers all manner of paramilitary violence and intimidation).

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Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 review – epic, single-take battle of bloody-minded intensity

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Only the most hardcore action junkies will have the stamina for what is essentially one marathon sword-fighting scene

The craziness is all in the idea of this singular Japanese action movie: essentially one marathon battle scene, filmed in a single take, in which a master swordsman takes down several hundred assailants. The execution, as it were, is a triumph of stuntwork, strategy and stamina, but in the watching it gets rather repetitive and wearying. Few but the most hardcore action junkies will really be up for it.

The set-up is quickly dealt with: a clan rallies in the forest around its newly anointed leader, a small boy, in anticipation of an attack. Attack there swiftly comes, in the form of Musashi Miyamoto: real-life master swordsman, 17th-century folk hero, and fixture of Japanese pop culture (Toshiro Mifune played him four times; Kinnosuke Nakamura played him seven times). Here, the role is filled with focused athleticism by local action hero Tak Sakaguchi, although acting abilities play a distant second to sword-swinging skills. The battle progresses through woodlands then into an abandoned village, with Miyamoto dispatching most of his inept assailants with a few efficient strokes: a slash to the neck, a chop to the top of the head, slashes across the belly as they practically hurl themselves into the path of his blade.

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WITCH: We Intend to Cause Havoc review – the history of Zamrock, Africa’s great forgotten rockers

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Film-maker Gio Arlotta and two young musicians are on a quest to track down the legendary leader of a 1970s Zambian band

Who knew 1970s Zambia had its own thriving musical genre? This modest documentary revisits the brief, almost-forgotten history of “Zamrock” – or at least what remains of it, which appears to be very little beyond the back catalogue of its leading band, Witch. Witch’s rhythmic blend of British blues, funk, psychedelic and garage rock has aged very well, and reissues of their albums in the 2010s found a new audience, including Italian film-maker Gio Arlotta, who consequently undertook an expedition to Zambia to try to find the band, accompanied by two young Dutch musicians, Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskovic.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey. One of the problems it runs into is a lack of surviving footage of Witch in action. Arlotta and co scour Zambia’s pre-digital archives, but the best they come up with is some unseen footage of James Brown. Nor does it help that most of Witch’s original lineup are dead.

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Black Widow review – Scarlett Johansson, the Russian super spy with an electra complex

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Great fun is had in giving us the backstory to the assassin’s place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The sensuous cough-syrup purr of Scarlett Johansson’s voice is something I’ve missed in lockdown; now it’s back with a throaty vengeance in the highly enjoyable standalone episode for which her character Black Widow was well overdue. It is co-written by WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer and directed with gusto by Cate Shortland, with touches of Terminator 2 and Mission: Impossible but undoubtedly keeping the tonal consistency of a typical MCU melodrama.

This movie gives us the backstory to Black Widow’s presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, involving an origin-myth tale of family trauma, identity crisis and sibling rivalry with a pugnacious kid sister, Yelena, entertainingly played by Florence Pugh. Yelena can’t help mocking – but also maybe envying – Black Widow’s balletic fight stance which involves absurd posing and resembles the mane-tossing antics of a woman in a shampoo advert.

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‘A heartbreaker and a heart mender’: how Sapphire’s Push birthed a new American heroine

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Twenty-five years after Sapphire’s novel Push was published, Tayari Jones salutes its groundbreaking heroine, Precious

In the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I discovered the work of Sapphire. As a college student, I hung out with a cluster of intense, arty types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines and small-press volumes. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire. What I remember most clearly was a poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for custody of her child. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. Angela speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are stigmatised, whose families are pathologised, and whose very lives are held up as everything America rejects. “She is a hero,” Angela declared, and I nodded in solemn agreement.

Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story being held up as an important work of literature

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Thomas Vinterberg: ‘There is a great need for the uncontrollable – but little room for it today’

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The Danish director’s new Oscar-winning film Another Round is about a group of teachers who dedicate themselves to getting drunk. He talks about losing control, patching up his friendship with Lars von Trier and the death of his daughter

Thomas Vinterberg looks back on the past six months with disbelief. “I made a film about four white, middle-aged, semi-fat men teaching their students to drink. I didn’t think it would survive.” Instead, Another Round swept the award ceremonies (best foreign language film at the Oscars and Baftas; best film at the European film awards and London film festival), and proved a spectacular box office success in his native Denmark when it opened between Covid restrictions. Vinterberg is a boyish 52-year-old, with an open smile and chestnut hair that has a touch of gel. A priest’s cassock hangs from the bookcase behind his chair. It is easy to overlook the cassock but, like Chekhov’s gun, it fires in the final act.

Vinterberg admits his film evolved in the making. “The initial idea was to be provocative. We wanted to celebrate alcohol and drinking. But that idea hit reality. It is a film about the generation divide. I hope it is a film about how we care for one another.” Another Round opens with a title card quoting the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.” This thought comes alive as golden youths are seen racing around a lake on an idyllic summer’s day, carrying crates of beer that they must finish as a team. It is a summer bacchanal, drawn from real life. “Both of my oldest daughters took part in the Lake Run,” Vinterberg says. “When I described it to American friends, they were shocked. They listened to the rules: the winners are the first to finish the crate. They wanted to know, was I OK with this? How could I tell them, actually, I was kind of proud?”

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Hear me out: why Confessions of a Shopaholic isn’t a bad movie

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The latest in our series of writers defending maligned films is a reconsideration of a critically loathed 2009 comedy

When Confessions of a Shopaholic, directed by PJ Hogan, of Muriel’s Wedding acclaim, was released in 2009 – a year that brought us the high-octane, male-dominated likes of The Hangover, Sherlock Holmes and Inglourious Basterds – it was the tail end of the romcom’s golden age. And, just like its genre-mates released that year – Bride Wars, He’s Just Not That Into You, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – Shopaholic received a wave of scathing reviews, weighing in at just 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Related: Hear me out: why Ishtar isn’t a bad movie

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Endangered Species review – bizarrely perky safari thriller deserves a mauling

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The serious anti-poaching message of this savanna-set family drama gets lost in the comic register of a US sitcom

The days of Africa-set films featuring white protagonists using glowing savannas as set dressing for first-world problems seemed to be numbered, but hold on: here is a fist-bitingly self-regarding family drama with Philip Winchester and X-Men’s Rebecca Romijn as Jack and Lauren Halsey, a seemingly dream couple off on a dream safari with son Noah and daughter Zoe, and her pothead boyfriend Billy. “Penny for them,” Lauren actually says to Jack, as they are Cessna-ing in. What is on this buff oilman’s mind, though, is that he has just been put on extended leave following an industrial accident.

His secret soon spills too, and Jack is so desperate to please his wife that he ignores safari-park protocol and lets them get too close to the fauna: a female rhinoceros and calf. “Wait, we shouldn’t be getting between them, right?” says Billy, a brief lapse into sensible ideas. One upended van later, with Jack’s leg gored, no mobile phone reception or water, and diabetic Lauren’s insulin levels running on empty, the Halseys find themselves in a world of hurt.

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