Film

Why are the Oscars such a lousy guide to great cinema?

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes of Wrath-ish journey through the Discourse, with essential Discourse stop-offs at an Amazon warehouse and the rust belt. It belongs in the New Yorker, not on screen. As with almost every film to win big since No Country for Old Men 13 years ago, you just think: the ‘highest honours in filmmaking’? For that? Amid all the change that’s being trumpeted at this year’s Oscars — more women directors, more ethnic minorities — the one thing missing is any discussion about why the awards are such a lousy guide

Awards season loses its shine when no one can go to the cinema

Here it is again, a couple of months later than usual but back nevertheless. It’s the time of the annual jamboree that is film awards season, a three-month extravaganza that predominantly revolves around three key events: the Golden Globes, the Baftas and the Oscars. All three of these celebrations of artistic excellence and mutual backslapping have been delayed due to Covid. The Globes took place — virtually — three weeks ago, Bafta revealed its shortlist last week and the Oscar nominees were announced on Monday. The starting gun has been fired — while all our cinemas remain closed. Have you seen Nomadland, The Father or Promising Young Woman? Of course

Spellbinding: Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time reviewed

The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian neurosurgeon meets a fellow Hungarian neurosurgeon at a medical conference, falls in love, and gives up her shiny life and career in America to be with him in Budapest. They had agreed to meet on one of the city’s bridges. He doesn’t show. She tracks him to the hospital where he works. He says he’s never met her before. And now we are on board. Now we have to know: is he gaslighting her? Is she crazy? How is this going to play out? This is one of those films

The best film of the year: Judas and the Black Messiah reviewed

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch, who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race, injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed so many times I fear none of us will see it in our

It’ll please small kids, but they’re never to be trusted: Raya and the Last Dragon reviewed

Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine, non-white representation, a narrative that isn’t hung up on romance — but no one involved appears to have asked themselves: do we have an interesting story? Do we have any fresh ideas? Is it fun? This may please very small kiddies who don’t know any better, and there are plenty of them about, but Raya’s not a classic in the making. It’s gorgeously depicted, needless to say, but disappointingly unanimated in all other ways. While this film may please small kiddies, remember: they are not to be trusted. Ever The

Contains nothing you couldn’t get from Wikipedia or YouTube: Netflix’s Pelé reviewed

Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who played in four World Cups (a record) and was one of the first global sporting superstars. But while there is plenty of footage showing his astonishing talent, if you’re interested in what made him tick, or what his life was like off the pitch, or how adulation might ultimately mess with your head, then move on, nothing to see here. Or, to put it another way, if, like me, you’re the sort of person who goes straight to ‘Personal life’ whenever you look someone up on Wikipedia, it’s as if

Assassins on screen: from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Samuel L. Jackson

After Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge goes back again to the contract killer well with her upcoming TV re-boot of the 2005 Brad Pitt/Angelina actioner Mr & Mrs Smith. Waller-Bridge will write and co-star with Atlanta’s Donald Glover, who also featured with her in the underwhelming Star Wars prequel Solo (2018). Could this be third time lucky for a TV take on the uxorious assassins? We’ve already had a 1996 series that predated the movie (starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello) and a 2007 show that never went beyond Doug Liman’s (who also directed the 2005 picture) pilot movie – with Martin Henderson and Jordana Brewster as the titular couple. Over

What to watch on Netflix this spring

With lockdown looking set to continue for weeks on end, more of us have become resigned to more time indoors – reluctantly or otherwise. Thankfully Netflix, as ever, is ready for the occasion, with a slew of new releases scheduled over the next two months. Here’s our guide to what’s coming up: Sky Rojo, 19 March ”  As tens of millions of addicts await the final instalment of his smash hit Money Heist (expected to land on Netflix later this year), Spaniard Alex Pina bridges the gap with the inaugural series of his latest show – a mile-a-minute glitzy thriller about three escaped prostitutes taking on pimps, patriarchy and everything in between. A

Horrible – but in a very fun way: I Care a Lot reviewed

I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s savage. It’ll make you dread old age even more than you already do, if that’s possible. It’s horrible in so many ways — cruel? Did I mention it’s also cruel? — yet it is also smart, stylish and such a fun watch. Written and directed by J. Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), the film stars Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson, who runs a business ripping off old people. Or, to put it more formally, she is a court-appointed legal guardian for elderly wards — or ‘marks’, as she calls

Our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons

On 5 July 2009, an unemployed 54-year-old metal detectorist called Terry Herbert was walking through a Staffordshire field when his detector started to beep and didn’t stop. Herbert guessed almost immediately that he’d found gold. What he didn’t realise was that he had made Britain’s greatest archaeological discovery since the second world war. Three hundred sword-hilt fittings, many of them spectacular examples of Anglo-Saxon metalwork; a mysterious gold-and-garnet headdress, apparently for a priest; miniature sculptures of horses, fish, snakes, eagles and boars. The Staffordshire Hoard, as it became known, led to a sold-out exhibition, an Early Day Motion in parliament saluting ‘the UK’s largest haul of gold Anglo-Saxon treasure’, and,

The two composers who defined British cinema also wrote inspired operas

It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage movies gather — Film 4, or the excellent Talking Pictures TV. Then search through their early-hours offerings, and press ‘record’ more or less at random. Gainsborough costume flicks; Rattigan adaptations; anything with John Mills in a submarine — it’s all good. Then, next day, trawl through the catch to see what’s surfaced, and who wrote the music. On a good night you might get Vaughan Williams in 49th Parallel, Richard Rodney Bennett in Billy Liar or — bewilderingly — the fire-breathing serialist Elisabeth Lutyens, keeping herself in cigarettes and brandy

Bryan Fogel on turning Jamal Khashoggi’s murder into a film

Bryan Fogel seems to have done it all. It’s hard to think of a showbiz figure with a more varied career. He began as a stand-up and moved to play-writing and then to directing movies. In 2013, he reinvented himself as the producer of hard-hitting documentaries that focus on international scandals and cover-ups. He talks to me via Zoom from Los Angeles about his latest movie, The Dissident. ‘I was seeking what my next film was going to be – something that spoke to human rights and freedom of expression. It checked all those boxes’. The subject is the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident journalist who was murdered in

Valentine’s films: from the romantic to the surreal

The first Valentine’s Day under lockdown looks set to prove the truth of Shakespeare’s oft quoted proverb: ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’. New love is nigh on impossible when couples are forbidden to meet, making technology the next best thing – in terms of communication, that is. An unusual Valentine’s Day surely calls for an offbeat film choice. The oddball romance is an established staple in film. Here are some worth relishing on the 14th February: Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017) – Amazon Prime & Amazon Prime Rent/Buy Annette Bening and Jamie Bell shine in this semi-fictionalised take on the fading years of idiosyncratic Hollywood star

This is cinema as car ad, says Geoff Dyer: News of the World reviewed

It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American west are abducted and then adopted by the tribe. Their plight is appalling — female captives were raped as a matter of course — but sometimes the hostages forget their mother tongue and come to relish the nomadic life of the plains. Another round of trauma follows when the adopted guardians are in turn massacred and the orphans are returned to the alien captivity of civilisation. The famous abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanches in 1836 and the prolonged attempts to find her — followed by her attempts to

Predictable, repetitive and exploitative: Run Hide Fight reviewed

In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really must see, as it wowed a festival in Bulgaria. But the other day, a PR reached out to boast excitedly about a film because it had been savaged, which was a first. ‘The film has absolutely enraged Hollywood critics,’ this person wrote, with obvious pride, before quoting the following from reviews: ‘insanely poor taste’, ‘wildly misjudged’, ‘tone deaf’, ‘gross’. What’s more, this person continued, while critics hate it — it has a critics’ score of 25 per cent at Rotten Tomatoes, the review- aggregator site — audiences are loving it

The Golden Globes: 8 of the best nominated films to watch

‘When it comes down to it, I’d rather have an action figure than a Golden Globe.’ – Chadwick Boseman The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has delayed the annual Hollywood Press Association Awards by two months; for the first time the show will be a bi-coastal affair, broadcast from the usual venue of The Beverly Hills Hilton on the West Coast and from The Rainbow Room in New York City. In their fourth crack at the gig,  the Golden Globe hosts will be Tina Fey (East Coast) and Amy Poehler (West), taking over from Ricky Gervais, who took his fifth turn at presenting the awards last year, where his trademark snark was felt by some

The Icelandic version was better – and had better knits: Rams reviewed

Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that better film. It’s the Icelandic one, of the same name, released in 2015, on which this Australian version is based. That was played as a spare, stark, bitterly dark comedy set amid ice and blizzards and featuring men with unkempt beards, whereas this is sunnier and more kempt and therefore significantly blander. You may even, at various points, feel as though you’ve been trapped in an overlong episode of All Creatures Great and Small (nothing against All Creatures Great and Small, but two hours of it?). The film stars the

The art of the remake: 10 films that rival the original

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to remake a film that is already considered a peerless masterpiece. Netflix was roundly trashed for attempting it with Rebecca. ‘Superficial and slapdash’ was the New Yorker’s verdict (one of the kinder ones): ‘somewhere between a lukewarm retread of Hitchcock’s original and a glossy Instagram feed’. As for the BBC’s Christmas three-part adaptation of Black Narcissus, not even Diana Rigg in her final role could save it from coruscating comparisons with the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film.  This year will see remakes, prequels and sequels of Top Gun, Cinderella and 101 Dalmations to name but three. But for a remake to be successful, it needs

Money money money: 10 movies about the markets

The furore in the US over the rocketing shares of previously written off companies such as GameStop, Blackberry, AMC Entertainment and Macy’s (the ‘Reddit Revolt’) has introduced stock market trading terms to the general public, with some folks newly opining (with a patina of assumed knowledge) about ‘hedge funds’, ‘penny shares’, ‘junk bonds’ ‘short-selling’ and ‘pump and dump’. But this is hardly the first-time similar events have occurred. Way back in 1720 the ‘South Sea Bubble’ saw investors suckered when the South Sea Company collapsed as any hopes of generating income from its monopoly on selling slaves to South America (mostly controlled by Spain and Portugal) had come to nought, despite

Remarkably moving: The Dig reviewed

Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. It was an immense buried boat, dating from the 7th century, and it yielded gilded treasure after gilded treasure, thereby wholly changing our understanding of the Dark Ages. ‘They weren’t dark… by Jupiter!’ as one archaeologist puts it here. It is a fascinating story that could have been told as a full-on thriller. But instead the film employs a delicious, graceful restraint, paying as much attention to deeply buried feeling as to what’s buried deeply in the earth. It’s remarkably moving. By Jupiter, I even cried by the