While we’re all still working our way through the deluge of new Christmastime content sloughed onto Netflix’s content library like loosened earth in a mudslide, the streaming giant has already begun teasing us with next year’s seasonal offerings. Production has commenced on their 2021 slate, and the first one on the books comes with an Read More
Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
One of the things that crops up repeatedly in Julian Temple’s lively profile doc Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is the fact that Shane MacGowan, erstwhile frontman of folk-punk doyens The Pogues, has a fondness for alcohol. Yes, there’s evidence here which suggests that Mr MacGowan liked to burn the candle Read More
Christmas gift guide 2020 – 10 ideas for film lovers
It’s safe to say that Christmas 2020 is going to feel very different. But if you’re still in the mood for gifting this year (and let’s be honest, who couldn’t use a bit of retail therapy right now) then we’ve got just the thing for you. Below we’ve hand-picked 10 film-related gifts which are currently Read More
A new film programme challenges perceptions of fat bodies
When I was growing up in the late 1990s and early ’00s, fat people were always the butt of the joke. Pop culture presented the likes of Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as rotund buffoons, lazy and food-obsessed, while rom-coms like Shallow Hal made a whole song and dance out of how hilarious it was that Read More
Falling
Viggo Mortensen steps behind the camera for this observational drama about bridging generational divides. To scan through a CV which is, to put it mildly, dizzyingly eclectic, you’d likely have a tough time guessing what type of film the actor Viggo Mortensen might make were he to step behind the camera. Toss in all his Read More
A new film asks, is there such a thing as a guilty pleasure?
Is there such a thing as a guilty pleasure? It’s certainly common for people to feel a sense of shame over their enjoyment of a particular kind of film. Indeed, it can be easier in conversation to praise a canonical classic instead of professing your love of something that might be deemed to have less Read More
It’s All True: A Conversation with David Fincher
It’s All True: A Conversation with David Fincher The master filmmaker behind Mank on Orson Welles, Pauline Kael and realising a passion project after a 30-year wait. From the pen of Jack Fincher comes Mank, the story of how perma-soused Hollywood hack Herman J Mankiewicz happened to write one of the greatest screenplays of all Read More
The other side of Marlene Dietrich
You can define a star first by how little it takes to recognise them. We all know Marlene Dietrich, the minute we see a wire-thin eyebrow, waves of butter-yellow hair and a gleaming top hat. Or when we hear her: those low, stately notes singing of love affairs lost, abandoned or entered into recklessly, in Read More
The Prom
Ryan Murphy’s star-studded restaging of the hit Broadway musical hits all the right notes. It’s always a worrying prospect when a beloved stage show is adapted for the screen – even more so in the wake of Cats. Thankfully, Ryan Murphy’s The Prom, based on the 2018 Broadway musical of the same name, is a Read More
An online European film festival is offering 10 films to watch at home – for free
It’s been a funny old year for film festivals, which has seen Cannes cancelled for the first time in 50 years and Toronto and New York pivot to totally online versions. An industry dominated by exciting showcases in exotic locales has had to totally rethink its identity – and as the pandemic continues, who knows Read More
Murder Me, Monster
A headless woman sparks a search for a mythical creature in Alejandro Fadel’s taut mountainside thriller. Appreciators of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed and Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux – Latin American social dramas that toy with horror to varying degrees – may find a new work to admire in Murder Me, Monster from writer/director Alejandro Read More
Watch this powerful new film about white guilt and Black womanhood
Somalia Seaton has made a name for herself as a gifted playwright, steadily crafting an impressive body of work for theatres including Stratford East, the Lyric, Soho Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her plays offer insightful and uncompromising perspectives on race, family, identity and womanhood. A Response to Your Message is her first foray Read More
I’m Your Woman
Rachel Brosnahan sheds her Mrs Maisel shtick in this compelling road movie about a woman on the run. It’s easy to become typecast as an actor, to become so identified with a particular role that an audience cannot fully believe you as anything else. Rachel Brosnahan has received such lofty praise for her performance in Read More
Hirokazu Koreeda is preparing his first Korean-language film
In the years following his historic Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda has been busy broadening his horizons. He broke in to the English and French languages for the first time in 2019 with The Truth, and now we’ve gotten wind that he’ll try his hand in Read More
David Squires on… The Queen’s Gambit: Hungry Hungry Hippos edition
Published 28 Nov 2020 Share this
Nimic
Matt Dillon joins Yorgos Lanthimos for this bizarre short about a New York cellist whose life is usurped by a passer-by. A grumpy New York concert cellist played by Matt Dillon is the flummoxed star of an eerie new short by Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos in collaboration with his regular scribe, Efthymis Filippou. It sees Read More
The films of Orson Welles – ranked
There are many Orson Welles, and each one of them contains multitudes. There’s the boy genius who directed Citizen Kane at just 25, a film regularly cited as The Greatest Ever Made. There’s the radio phenomenon who brought national panic to the United States with his broadcast of HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’. There’s Read More
Could you design an El Camino bumper sticker?
One of TV’s best-loved characters made his long-awaited big-screen debut last year, as fans were reunited with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) in a white-knuckle thriller that brought a fitting end to the Breaking Bad saga. To celebrate the home entertainment release of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which is available now to own on Read More
Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions
Taylor Swift and her folklore collaborators perform and dissect the pandemic album at New York’s Long Pond Studios. It’s been a decidedly cinematic year for Taylor Swift, whose 2020 has so far included the release of both Miss Americana and the concert film City of Lover, not to mention the most recent two in an Read More
Red, White and Blue
John Boyega tackles institutional bigotry within the Metropolitan Police in Steve McQueen’s searing anti-racism drama. Steve McQueen’s Red, White and Blue, which is part of his Small Axe anthology series, confirms its brilliance at the very moment it cuts to black and its first end credit appears. That’s not to say the drama which precedes Read More
Why now is the perfect time to watch Goodbye, Dragon Inn
It’s not the first time that the mass extinction of the old-school picture house has been forecast. Yet in the wake of a second round of coronavirus lockdowns, forcing cinemas throughout the UK to temporarily shutter, with some major chains such as Cineworld and Odeon closing all of their venues indefinitely, the future looks undeniably Read More
Brandon Cronenberg: ‘We built a wax Andrea Riseborough’
Brandon Cronenberg: ‘We built a wax Andrea Riseborough’ The genre prodigy talks perfect casting and practical effects in his latest shocker, Possessor. Eight years after his striking debut Antiviral, genre upstart Brandon Cronenberg is back with with his second feature Possessor, an ultra-violent, nightmarish film about mind-controlling assassins that flows on a gushing river of Read More
Channing Tatum reunites with Lord & Miller for a monster movie send-up
Universal failed in their first attempt to engineer a connected cinematic universe joining remade versions of their classic monster-movie rogues’ gallery, but that hasn’t deterred the studio. The smashing success of Leigh Whannell‘s recent The Invisible Man has reignited interest in this dormant IP, and triggered a wave of new deals for fresh takes on Read More
Possessor
Brandon Cronenberg follows up his impressive debut Antiviral with a visceral slice of hallucinatory ultraviolence. It has been eight years since the release of Brandon Cronenberg’s debut feature, Antiviral, an impressively nasty little satire about a future in which celebrity diseases become highly priced commodities. In the intervening years, that film’s mad premise has come Read More
Lovers Rock
Steve McQueen delivers a sublime party film for the ages in the second instalment of his Small Axe series. There is absolutely no doubt that Steve McQueen is one of the finest British filmmakers we’ve ever had: from his haunting Bobby Sands biopic Hunger to 2018’s masterful heist thriller Widows, it would seem there is Read More
Happiest Season
Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis star in Clea DuVall’s festive rom-com about going home and coming out. In an ideal world, Christmas paraphernalia (decorations, films, songs and, yes, mince pies) would only surface between the period of 1-31 December. In that same world, a holiday movie starring a same-sex couple wouldn’t be a news story, Read More
Looking into the heart of Miller’s Crossing
Way back yonder, in the year 1994, after a viewing of the futuristic action movie Demolition Man from a VHS rented from Ritz Video in Palmers Green, London, I professed to anyone who would listen that this was my all-time favourite film. I think it was related to the fact that the final-level bad guy Read More
Trauma and catharsis in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin
Trauma never truly leaves you. It shapes the choices you make, the people you love, the way you cope. Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin is about different coping mechanisms – acceptance and denial – viewed through the lens of two men who were abused as children. Throughout human history, men have been taught how not to Read More
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The entertaining true story of the titular “Mother of the Blues” sees Chadwick Boseman shine in his final performance. In the opening scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, two Black men run through the woods in what feels like a familiarly chilling incident given the historical context. The men frantically scramble their way through the Read More
Patrick
One man’s quest to find his missing hammer becomes a profound existential journey in this stripped-down comedy. “It’s all down to an uncertain void that has been created,” says Herman (Pierre Bokma) as he addresses the residents of a naturist campsite in a bid to take over now that the owner Rudy (Josse De Pauw) Read More