Film
Two-thirds of the way through Woody Allen’s new-but-not-really-new film Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet’s nerve-shot, middle-aged tragic heroine, Ginny, turns to her younger lover, Mickey (Justin Timberlake as a living Ken doll), and says forlornly, ‘Rescue me’. I could not have composed a sadder, more apt summation of the ...
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Few bad films have received such prolonged adoration and exposure as The Room. The story of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), an ‘All-American guy’, and his fiancée, the ‘devious’ Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who cheats on him with his handsome best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), has been screening in cinemas worldwide since its initial ...
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One can pinpoint the moment at which The Killing of a Sacred Deer gets stuck, like a train between stations. It happens midway through the film, during a scene set in a hospital cafeteria, somewhere in Cincinnati. A greying, bearded cardiologist (Colin Farrell) sits opposite a teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) whose gormless, sweaty ...
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On Chesil Beach is not Ian McEwan’s first screenplay, nor his only adaptation for the screen. The Children Act (2017), directed by Richard Eyre and based on McEwan’s 2014 novel, is also due for release in 2018. In an interview he gave at the Toronto International Film Festival, where both films premièred, McEwan ...
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Imagine, if you can, an elderly white man, Michael Caton, stretching his arms wide and performing an Indigenous dance as part of a traditional welcome at a summer, country-town folk festival, before delivering a sermon on the virtues of acceptance and multiculturalism to a smiling, nodding, ethnically diverse circle of music lovers ...
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Vincent van Gogh called homes ‘human nests’, and in Auvers-sur-Oise it was a nest he was after, to regain his poise through work and rest. Loving Vincent, a Polish–English co-production, spends most of its time in Auvers, where Vincent died an arduous death in 1890, but begins in Arles, where Vincent made friends such ...
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Six films into his career as a director, George Clooney is still a little indistinct as a filmmaker, though there are certain subjects – television, politics, the intersection of the two – to which he returns. What’s indistinct is the voice. He has struggled through a tall-tale biopic (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, 2003), a screwball ...
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Tom of Finland is a worthy enshrinement of the life of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920–91) into the cinematic pantheon of queer historical biographies. The World War II veteran and advertising art director best known as ‘Tom of Finland’ drew thousands of naked and leather-clad men with gigantic nipples and ...
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The new Blade Runner doesn’t surpass the original, contra some breathless early reviews, but what could? Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic is a remarkable feat of design, the perfect vehicle for a director who received his training at the Royal College of Art, and a streamlined thriller with existential heft. It features a haunting score from ...
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Song to Song is writer and director Terrence Malick’s cinematic version of the modernist literary experiment: multiple internalised viewpoints, stream-of-consciousness narrative, chronological fragmentation, and a reality apprehended through symbolic or metaphoric conjunction. He is abetted in this project by ...
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