Film
The game of tennis is simple: hit the ball over the net and make sure it lands between the straight white lines. It’s simpler than life, though tennis, like all other sports, is designed to act as its mirror – spectator sports are enticing because they lay bare the emotions that the complications of real life often obfuscate. Tennis is weaponised in this same way in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a psychosexual sports drama that marries the mercuriality of love and lust with the capriciousness of a sport oft won by millimetres. ... (read more)
The Alliance Française French Film Festival, the world’s largest showcase of French cinema outside of France, returns in 2024 for its thirty-fifth edition, with its usual eclectic mix of films from arthouse to mainstream cinema. Francophiles and cinephiles alike can see films from a range of genres, including drama, romantic comedy, social comedy, thriller, and historical biopic – from renowned directors like Marcel Carné and Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, to newcomers like Marie Amachoukeli. This year’s festival features the usual big names in French cinema – Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Laure Calamy, and Mathieu Almaric – alongside some excellent début performances. Here are some of the highlights.
... (read more)Sofia Coppola’s films are suffused with the bittersweet inevitability of adolescence: a period of life that changes you irrevocably and comes with an in-built ending. Anyone who has studied History at high school knows the outcome of Marie Antoinette (2006). In The Virgin Suicides (1999), it’s right there in the title. This sense of languid doom has never been more apparent than in Coppola’s new biopic Priscilla (based on its subject’s own memoir, Elvis and Me (1985, with Sandra Harmon). We already know how this story ends – so the writer-director invites us to take the scenic route, emphasising texture and psychology over drama and causality.
... (read more)The holidays are fast approaching, which means it’s time for Hollywood A-listers to adopt thick accents (and don even thicker prosthetics) to re-enact the lives of historical celebrities in the pursuit of awards season glory. This year alone, we have had Oppenheimer and Napoleon and are staring down the barrel of Ferrari, Priscilla, Rustin, and Bob Marley: One Love, each promising to grapple with the challenge of effectively capturing an entire human life in the span of two multiplex-friendly hours (and in a manner sanctioned by their subjects’ estates and living relatives).
... (read more)