Film

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is set in the 1970s and has punk as the backdrop and an excellent cast (Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson, Elle Fanning). It also features what could be a decent premise (boy who treats girls as if from another planet meets actual girl from another planet). But everything it has going for it is undone by what it doesn’t have going for it, which is substantial. This could, in fact, have been titled How to Stay Awake Once You’ve Lost All Patience because, I now know, staying awake once you’ve lost all patience makes talking to girls at parties look like a walk in

Andrew Haigh makes inaction films. Weekend (2011) tells of two young homosexuals getting to know each other in Nottingham. In the wintry marital drama 45 Years (2015) two old heterosexuals get to unknow each other in Norfolk. The canvases are miniature, the resonances crevasse-deep. His third film, Lean on Pete, brings a change of scene and scope. And volume. Hooves thunder. A fatal gunshot goes off. Ornery men bawl and holler. There is a devastating road accident, and a climactic act of hideous violence. It’s as if Haigh has contracted ’roid rage. What he’s actually done is get on a plane to Oregon to adapt a novel by Willy Vlautin.

When I first read that Beast is a serial-killer thriller my heart sank like a stone — yet more women raped, butchered, murdered; splendid, bring it on. But it is, in fact, fascinating and brilliant, and not like any serial-killer thriller you’ve seen before. This is because a woman owns it. Psychologically and emotionally. Not because she’s the actual killer, although if she were the killer would she need to work four times as hard to achieve the same notoriety as a man? Kill eight to his two? But we mustn’t allow that to hold us up. Beast is a feature-length debut for writer/director Michael Pearce and it stars Jessie

Two films about women this week. One, Funny Cow, is about a woman who daringly takes on men at their own game while the other, Let the Sunshine In, is dressed up in French art-house garb but basically has Juliette Binoche tirelessly running round Paris in thrall to every fella she encounters. I certainly know which I preferred. However, if you look at review aggregate sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see Sunshine achieves the far higher score. But then most film critics are male and probably wouldn’t mind Juliette Binoche tirelessly chasing them round Paris, or anywhere else. (I have just asked a man if this is so and he

Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the subject in hand (domestic abuse), and is one of those films that will have you totally gripped while you’ll also be longing for it to end, as it’s so unbearably tense. I swear my heart as good as stopped several times. It’s written and directed by Xavier Legrand, who handles both genres with supreme elegance. Or, to put it another way, it’s like a Ken Loach film that’s been hijacked by Stephen King, but seamlessly. (‘Mind if I have a go, Ken?’, ‘Be my guest, Steve’.) This is Legrand’s second

Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at its painful slowness. You will wonder at the way it strains credulity until it snaps. You will wonder if the violins will ever give it a rest. You will wonder if it will ever end. And you will wonder at the ending, when it does finally come, as it is so stupid. So it does not short-change on the wonder front. Whatever the price of your cinema ticket, you will be getting limitless wonder in return. Haynes is usually such an immaculate, thoughtful, winning filmmaker (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet

The latest film from Wes Anderson is a doggy animation set in a fantasy Japan and as there was a screening in London earlier this week for owners and their dogs I took my own dog, Monty. He said he liked it. It was ‘good’, he said. I did not especially trust his opinion so investigated further. As good as, say, drinking from the toilet? ‘No,’ he said, ‘not as good as that, obvs.’ As good as this tennis ball here? ‘No’, he said, ‘because a tennis ball is always AMAZING!’ As good as cheese? ‘Nothing is as good as cheese. Fair play, you caught me out there.’ You didn’t

Andy Warhol would probably have been surprised to learn that his 1964 film ‘Empire’ had given rise to an entire genre. This work comprises eight hours and five minutes of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building during which nothing much happens. Warhol remarked that it was a way of watching time pass or, you might say, the Zen of boredom. Much the same could be said of the films in Tacita Dean’s two exhibitions, Portrait and Still Life at the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery respectively. The most ambitious of these, ‘Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS’ (2008), on show at the NPG, is composed of six separate films, each

There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the film director listening live as the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced from Los Angeles. The tension mounts as they approach the foreign film category. Alas, Force Majeure from Sweden isn’t nominated. Ostlund disappears off screen to sob and mewl. This year, there was a sequel to the video, but with a happier ending: the director’s latest film The Square was nominated for an Oscar. These mini-movies, like the rest of Ostlund’s oeuvre, are funny but subtly savage. He is a provocateur who trades in discomfort. You watch with

Films about the Winter Olympics don’t grow on conifers. Twenty-five years ago there was Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsleigh team. It took many years for Eddie the Eagle to reach the screen. Both were cockle-warming comedies about implausible Olympians who embody the ideal that participation is all. Only last week Elise Christie, the British speed skater who kept tumbling in Pyeongchang (and Sochi), hoped that ‘Reese Witherspoon’ would play her in the movie. In the mean time, the latest Olympiad has flushed out two more biopics on ice. I, Tonya tells of Tonya Harding’s catastrophic career. Like Monica Lewinsky, Harding is a public figure whose epitaph, thanks to a

Dark River is the much-anticipated third feature from British writer/director Clio Barnard and it is one of those bleak, rural- England dramas featuring cement-coloured skies, wind, rain, mud, rusted old farm machinery and dead animals — do people who move out from the city know what they are letting themselves in for? — as well as the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. (Should we pull them aside and have a word?) Apologies for sounding glib about such a heavy subject but this is, ultimately, so heavy-handed about that heavy subject it left me cold. I should point out, however, that other critics are available, and some are saying it is

Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain us as it is basically only this: girl has a mum. (Or: girl has a mum, and sometimes they row and sometimes they don’t.) But thus far it has won near universal critical praise, two Golden Globes and five Oscar nominations, thereby proving there is mileage in girls and their mums, and box office in girls and their mums, and that girls and their mums can be more than mere afterthoughts. In this respect, Lady Bird may, in fact, be quite the rare bird. It’s set in Sacramento, California, in

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier whose life is disrupted when he falls for a waitress who, in the most unexpected way, proves his match. It is a wonderfully fixating film in every respect, and wholly non-formulaic. And it miraculously transforms an addition to a breakfast order — ‘…and sausages’ — into one of the sexiest things ever said. Ultimately, its meaning will be open to interpretation. I saw it as the rather timely story of a man who is finally forced to cut out his misogynist heart and see women as real people, but your

Downsizing is a film with the most brilliant premise. What if, to save the planet, we were all made tiny? What if we only took up a tiny amount of space and flew in tiny planes and produced tiny amounts of rubbish? And what if we could live in the sort of mansions that would cost millions if they were regular-sized? What if, what if, what if, what if… but most crucially: what if this film had run with the premise rather than throwing it away? Could it have avoided becoming just another dumb ‘white saviour’ movie? And this, alas, is the ‘what if’ that must preoccupy us today. This