Category Archives: Drama films

Imperial Blue review – Ugandan adventures of a drug-smuggling dope

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A dealer who dreams of discovering the source of a mystical substance that lets you see the future heads deep into Africa

Drug smuggler Hugo (Nicolas Fagerberg) has “the connect”. Or he’d like to think he does. Certainly this debut feature from British director Dan Moss knows several good spots, guiding us through a series of impressive locations with the confidence of a seasoned traveller. After Hugo’s big-money hashish deal in a partly flooded Mumbai building site goes wrong, he’s introduced to Bulu, a blue-powdered hallucinogen with mystical properties. “They say it makes you see the future,” says his go-between (Ashish Verma). Could this mysterious substance make Hugo enough money to satisfy his UK-based bosses? He’ll have to track down a supply source first.

Everything about the London drug world that Hugo then stops off in – from the 80s punk get-ups of the big players to the readiness with which these supposedly shrewd operators approve Hugo’s wild goose chase – is risibly unrealistic. But he’s soon en route to “Fort Lugard, Uganda”, where the plot is on safer ground.

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‘The humanity of black characters is often forgotten’: behind Oscar-tipped One Night in Miami

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In an acclaimed new film, the story of a night between four major figures – Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali – is brought to life

One thing is certain: vanilla ice cream was eaten. The rest? If only we knew.

The year is 1964 and activist Malcolm X, singer-songwriter Sam Cooke and American football player Jim Brown gather in Miami, Florida, to cheer boxer Muhammad Ali – then Cassius Clay – to his first world heavyweight championship. No celebration is planned because he was not expected to win, so the four repair to Malcolm’s hotel room in the segregated African American part of town.

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Daniel review – terrifying tale of an Isis captive

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The family of a photojournalist held in Syria must raise a multimillion-dollar ransom after the Danish government refuses to negotiate

Over the last couple of decades, Danish cinema has increasingly proved to have a strong aptitude for emotive, nuanced drama and intelligent engagement, particularly through documentary-making, with conflicts abroad. This inspired-by-a-true-story feature, from journeyman director Niels Arden Oplev (who helmed the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film) skilfully combines those two strands to tell the story of Daniel Rye, a young Danish photographer who was captured by Isis in Syria in 2013.

Filmed in a wiggly, handheld fashion – such a signature of the Dogma 95 years it almost feels like a retro affectation – the plot tracks methodically through Daniel’s story, holding tight on the expressive face of Esben Smed, who rises to the physical challenges of the role. For starters, he has to convincingly pass as Rye when he was young enough to be a contender for the Danish gymnastics team, although presumably a stuntman performed most of the acrobatics we see.

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Franka Potente: How we made Run Lola Run

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‘I had to sprint across Berlin in a pair of Dr Marten boots – and I was smoking two packs a day back then’

I was in New York shooting a couple of films when I got this script called Lola Rennt (Lola Runs). I read it and thought: “This is cool – but kind of weird, too.” I flew back to Berlin, met the writer-director Tom Tykwer, and realised the energy I had felt on the page came from him.

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Michael Apted: a vital and dignified director who understood how class shapes us all

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Apted made his name with the brilliant Up TV series that examined people’s lives every seven years, before going on to become a film-maker of distinction, whose influence cannot be overstated

Michael Apted, who has died aged 79, was a British movie director who – like Ken Loach and Ken Russell – earned his stripes working on TV. But it was his destiny to help create an epic ongoing masterpiece for the small screen with truly cinematic scope and beyond: current-affairs television which had the scale of cinema, combined with the Mass Observation Project and the Roman census.

Granada Television’s Seven Up! from 1964, was, to quote a comedy of the era, not so much a programme, more a way of life. It took 14 British children at the Jesuit age of seven (that is, the age at which the Jesuits’ St Ignatius of Loyola famously said he could “show you the man” if schooled early enough) and interviewed them about their lives and opinions – seven from a working-class background and seven from a posher caste. Then it was updated every seven years, finally spanning 56 years.

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This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection review – an uncompromising tale of resistance

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Mary Twala gives an intimate yet epic performance as an 80-year-old widow fighting plans for dam that will obliterate her village in Lesotho

This is an extraordinary and otherworldly feature film from the tiny landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. It is the tale of a rebel spirit: an elderly woman who opposes government plans to flood her village, making way for a dam. It’s a film about resistance and resilience, but director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is coolly unsentimental and realistic about the inevitable march of capitalism and construction. Weaving in ideas around displacement, collective identity and history, this film takes on almost mythic qualities.

Related: From Beyoncé to the Oscars: Mary Twala, Africa's queen of cinema

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How Promising Young Woman shows the limits of #MeToo revenge

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The tart Oscar-tipped dark comedy offers an intoxicating revenge plot against bad men. But can insight be found in assuming everyone’s worst potential?

Promising Young Woman, writer/director Emerald Fennell’s acidic dark comedy which coats an incendiary rape revenge plot with a pastel sheen, runs an alluring, looping trap: Cassie, a singularly obsessed character played with singularly impressive depth by Carey Mulligan, pretends to be near-passed-out drunk at a bar, plays along to a skeevy man’s predatory machinations, then flips the switch when he begins to sexually assault a woman he believes is too drunk to notice or care. “What are you doing?” she asks, suddenly stone-cold sober. The first time Cassie pulls the trap, in the film’s first sequence, it’s not quite shocking – if you’ve seen the trailer, you know her revenge scheme – but given that it’s The OC heartthrob Adam Brody as the aw-shucks predator, Mulligan’s archly calibrated facade drop is an enticing and unnerving jolt.

Related: Promising Young Woman review – Carey Mulligan ignites fiery #MeToo revenge tale

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Dune, Bond and Top Gun returns: Films to look out for in 2021

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Daniel Craig hands in his licence to kill, Frances McDormand delivers her best ever performance, Carey Mulligan unsettles in a rape-revenge drama and Tom Cruise reaches for the skies … this year’s must-see films

Paul Greengrass’s latest film is based on the western novel by Paulette Jiles, about a girl returning to her family in 1860s Texas after being kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe. Helena Zengel plays the girl, Johanna, and Tom Hanks plays the man who must look after her: Captain Kidd, an ex-army veteran who makes a living reading aloud from newspapers to illiterate townsfolk, and who is now in the middle of a very big news story.
• Released in the UK on 1 January

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The 2020 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year

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Alongside our countdown of the best films of 2020, our chief film critic selects his favourite movies, directors and performances of the year

As for everyone and everything else, this has been a traumatising year for cinema. Many new movies have had to be viewed at home, on streaming services, and cinephiles have had to accept this arrangement, rather like gourmets who see their favourite restaurants survive by repurposing themselves as delivery and takeaway centres. And streaming has, arguably, given a new audience to independent and arthouse cinema that might not otherwise have much of a showing in theatres.

Lockdown has intensified the debate about the validity of the small-screen experience of cinema – and it’s especially intense for me, when I consider one of my favourite films of the year. Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock is one of the glorious works in McQueen’s superb five-movie Small Axe sequence about the Black British experience. It is gloriously cinematic and was slated to feature at this year’s (cancelled) Cannes film festival. But it was commissioned by the BBC, and so the vast majority of the people enjoying this wonderful film will be doing so on the small screen. That’s why it is being described, understandably, as one the television highlights of the year.

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Kim Ki-duk: punk-Buddhist shock, violence – and hypnotic beauty too

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The South Korean director, who has died of Covid, was at the forefront of a new wave of uncompromising cinema

Of all the film-makers of what might loosely be called the new Asian wave of the 21st century, perhaps the most challenging and mysterious – and probably the most garlanded on the European festival circuit – was South Korean director Kim Ki-duk. He made movies which were shocking, scabrous and violent - yet also often hauntingly sad and plangently beautiful and sometimes just plain weird. But they were strangely hypnotic. In 2011, I was on the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury which gave the top prize to his opaque docufictional piece Arirang, and though I struggle a bit now to recapture the mood of certainty that led us to that decision, there is no doubt about that Kim’s work had a commanding effect.

In fact, Kim himself might be a more prominent figure himself were it not that he was involved in the #MeToo controversy – three actors accused him of sexual assault which resulted in a fine for the director and inconclusive recrimination in the civil courts.

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Let Them All Talk review – haughty Meryl Streep is queen of the high seas

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Tensions arise between a writer and her coterie aboard an ocean liner in Steven Soderbergh’s sweet, unfocused drama

There’s an awful lot going on in this new movie from Steven Soderbergh. The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.

The story is mostly set (and economically filmed, by Soderbergh himself) on a luxury liner, , the Queen Mary 2, crossing from New York to Southampton. Meryl Streep plays Alice Hughes, a renowned novelist whose reputation and sales rely chiefly on a sensational early book about the collapse of a woman’s marriage. Her agent (Gemma Chan) takes her out for lunch and has to charm her cantankerous client into going to London to accept a prestigious award; she is also nervous about the fact that Alice still hasn’t delivered her latest manuscript but excited at the rumours that it could be a sequel to the sensational early book.

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A Girl from Mogadishu review – tragedy and joy in a daring escape

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This based-on-fact story of a teenager who flees war in Somalia to become a crusading activist against FGM is earnest but effective drama

Inspired by real events, this earnest but effective drama depicts how Ifrah Ahmed (played as a teenager by Malaika Herrador, and as an adult by Aja Naomi King) escaped Somalia during a war in 2006, made it to Ireland where she was eventually granted asylum, and then went on to become a crusading activist against female genital mutilation. It’s certainly a remarkable story, one full of tragedy, adventure, suspense and even moments of joy, especially in the latter half when Ahmed finds a community of friends and allies willing to help her quest.

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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review – Chadwick Boseman glorious in his final film role

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The movie version of August Wilson’s story of the blues, starring Boseman and a tremendous Viola Davis, is a ferocious opera of passion and pain

A detonation of pure acting firepower is what’s on offer in this movie version of August Wilson’s 1982 stage play. Declarative and theatrical it might be, but it’s also ferociously intelligent and violently focused, an opera of passion and pain. We see African-American musicians hanging around a white-owned Chicago studio one stiflingly hot day in the 1920s, waiting for the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey to show up with her entourage so they can cut an album. The lead track is expected to be her live hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the drama imagines a certain pushy trumpeter in the band named Levee angling for his own version to be recorded. A simmering argument about how this song is to be arranged and performed forms the basis of a confrontation about race, sex and power.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with tremendous hauteur: Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I never arrived at Hampton Court with more magnificent display or more queenly prerogative than Davis’s Rainey making her entrance, with her own lovers and court favourites, sweating at the temperature, her painful feet and the incompetence of the studio chiefs. And Chadwick Boseman gives a moving performance as the fiercely talented but insecure Levee, crucified by a childhood experience of racist violence and dreaming of fronting his own band.

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Luxor review – beautifully sparse character study amid Egypt’s ancient glory

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Andrea Riseborough stars as a war-zone medic going through a low-key mid-life crisis as she tries to recover by visiting the famous archaeological site

Slow, delicate and sparse, Luxor is coming out on digital this week just as all the cinemas close down again. If you have a chance to see it, try to view it in the dark, without distractions, on the biggest screen you can in order to approximate a cinema setting and to best appreciate its deep-breath pacing and dry-heat beauty.

Writer-director Zeina Durra’s feature, her second after the evocatively titled The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, follows English surgeon Hana (an unusually subdued Andrea Riseborough, giving a great, slow-burn performance) as she recovers from the horrors of working in a Syrian war zone for an aid organisation. As she rests up at a plush hotel in Luxor, the open-air museum of a town in Egypt she used to live in years 20 before, she passes the time visiting the sights and having polite interactions with other guests and tourists, all the while considering what may be an even more traumatic assignment in Yemen.

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Helena Bonham Carter: ‘Divorce is cruel. But some parts are to be recommended’

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She doesn’t believe in a stiff upper lip, or pretending – unless it’s for work. The actor talks about her split with Tim Burton, friendship with Johnny Depp, and playing the Queen’s sister

Ding-dong, it’s the doorbell. And look who’s standing on my rain-sodden doorstep, it’s Helena Bonham Carter. In her stompy, clumpy boots and dark floral ruffled dress, curls piled on top of her head, she looks so exactly herself – which is to say, like a Victorian goth drawn in charcoal – that she could be an actor playing a character playing Helena Bonham Carter. Which, to a certain degree, she is.

“I love dressing up and creating myself, as it were, according to the day and the mood. But it’s an illusion, because then the Daily Mail photographs you, and you see it and think, that wasn’t what I meant at all,” she says as we walk into my kitchen and I compliment her outfit. Her fashion sense – invariably described as quirky (“God, quirky,” she says, as if repeating a doctor’s fatal diagnosis) – has made her a favourite of the paparazzi, and photos of her mooching around London in her distinctive outfits have been a staple of the tabloids for several decades. Does she ever think, “I’ll dress normcore today – that’ll throw off the paps”?

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Red, White and Blue review – Steve McQueen and John Boyega hit gold

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Issues of bigotry, belonging, race and redemption and are unpicked in this majestic biopic of police officer Leroy Logan

Steve McQueen’s five-movie series for the BBC, Small Axe, only gets more thrilling and captivating with the appearance of this new episode at the New York film festival. He is setting new gold standard for drama – and cinema – on screens of any size.

Related: Lovers Rock review – Steve McQueen throws the best party ever

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Terminal Sud review – powerful dispatch from a civil war

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Ramzy Bedia is captivating as a charismatic doctor in this French-Algerian drama about a country descending into chaos

French-Algerian film-maker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche sends us a dispatch from a civil war with Terminal Sud, an intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos. The facts on the ground here seem to tally with the Algerian civil war of the 90s, the so called “black decade” that claimed more than 100,000 lives. But the film was mostly shot in southern France, and Ameur-Zaïmeche doesn’t hide contemporary details such as mobiles and new-model SUVs. He has said in interviews that the point is to make it universal: this could happen any time, anywhere. The approach isn’t entirely convincing, and the unfocused sense of time and place is a bit distracting and frustrating at times. But there is real power to many of the scenes.

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Frances McDormand starrer Nomadland wins the Golden Lion at Venice film festival

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Drama featuring McDormand as a retiree forced on the road after the 2008 recession takes top honours on the Lido, while Vanessa Kirby is named best actress

Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, a recession-era road trip drama starring Frances McDormand, won the Golden Lion for best film on Saturday at a slimmed-down Venice film festival, which was held against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic.

Zhao and McDormand appeared by video from the United States to accept the award, as en virus-related travel restrictions made reaching the Lido in the Italian lagoon city difficult if not impossible for many Hollywood filmmakers and actors.

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Sun Children review – Iranian street kids strike gold

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Majid Majidi’s cast of young toughs digging for treasure under a school deliver a heart-rending story with unexpected depth of emotion

Sun Children, by the Iranian director Majid Majidi, gives us a prison-break drama that is escaping to nowhere, and a knockabout school comedy gone horribly wrong. The acting is broad, the plot gears often creak, but it has guts and heart and a grubby, street-smart charisma. It’s one of the finest films playing in this year’s Venice competition.

Dedicated to “the 152m children forced into child labour”, this casts 12-year-old Roohollah Zamani as Ali, the pint-sized boss of a gang of thieves, a miniature wheel inside a much bigger machine, working for an unnamed local crime boss who skulks on the rooftop amid his pigeon coops. The boss wants Ali to retrieve a hoard of unspecified treasure, which is either buried in the local graveyard or in the drainage pipe that runs beside it. And the only way he can do it is to go back to school.

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Again Once Again review – elegant meditation on the pains of motherhood

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This engaging, philosophical film unpicks the challenges faced by a young mother trying to reconnect with the life she had before her son’s birth

A woman leaves her boyfriend to visit her mum in Buenos Aires, taking their three-year-old son with her – not sure yet if it’s a holiday or a breakup. She hasn’t worked since her son was born and is having an emotional and intellectual crisis. She feels almost non-existent. “I don’t see myself. Who am I?”

This is an elegant, elusive debut from the Argentinian playwright Romina Paula, who picks away at the fantasy that motherhood leads to instant fulfilment. Her film is like an arthouse version of the sitcoms Motherland and Catastrophe, with fewer laughs and more philosophical introspection. It has the feel of a feminist essay that has been semi-dramatised for screen – with Paula starring as a fictional version of herself and her real-life mum and son Ramón playing themselves.

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