Film

Staggeringly confident and powerful: After Love reviewed

As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is that the one where they all did it? Or is that the train one? — I thought I’d alert you to a film that may have slipped under your radar: After Love. It was released last year. It’s a small film, tiny. I don’t know what the budget was but it wasn’t $90 million. Yet it’s already won many awards, rightly, and has just been nominated for three Baftas and is staggeringly confident and powerful. I guess we’ll now never know who did it on that boat. Unless they all

Why BAFTA has shunned the Oscars A-list

Last week, the nominations for the BAFTA film awards were announced and very swiftly afterwards the annual chorus of lamentation started up. For whatever poor old BAFTA does, a vocal segment of film fans and critics alike will declare themselves unhappy. BAFTAs-bashing, it can often seem, is how those in cultural circles like to keep themselves warm and entertained in the darkest and dullest months of the year. As if that weren’t enough, hot on BAFTA’s sweaty heels come the Oscar nominations, providing the opportunity to grumble on an international scale. As recently as 2020, grave accusations of ‘whitewashing’ were levelled at the British Academy, when it somehow managed to

The return of the black and white movie – and ten of the best to watch

Are black and white films making a comeback – or did they ever really go away?  With Belfast, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Passing, Mank and Roma all generating critical buzz, they are certainly having a moment. Even after the advent of colour motion pictures, black and white movies continued to be made, chiefly for economic (lower cost stock) and aesthetic reasons. Some present-day directors have even released monochrome versions of their colour movies, including The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2008) Logan: Noir (James Mangold, 2017) and Guillermo del Toro’s remake of 1947’s Nightmare Alley (2021). Why is the Black and White format growing in popularity? For a few directors, it can be a pretentious device,

Sounds ghastly but it’s somehow riveting: The Souvenir – Part II reviewed

The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not Sing 2, for instance. It’s not the exploitation of a franchise. And it’s not as if the industry has run out of original ideas for autobiographical films about becoming a film-maker in London in the 1980s. The two were always conceived as a pair telling the one story — and they would have been made back-to-back had Hogg not run out of money. So it’s the one story with a wait in-between which, admittedly, has been a trial. Did Julie make her graduation film about working-class kids in Sunderland? Which

A film lover’s guide to the best of Almodóvar

After some lengthy troughs and fallows, iconic Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is enjoying a purple patch with critical acclaim for 2019’s autobiographical Pain & Glory and his new picture Parallel Mothers. Star Penélope Cruz is tipped to have a good chance of winning the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance as middle-aged mother-to-be Janis Martinez. But if anyone believes that advancing years (he turned 72 last September) have tamed the provocateur, they should think again, as the film’s theatrical release poster (featuring a lactating nipple) was temporarily censored by Instagram. Although not many people in the UK actually pay to see his films, it’s probably fair to say that

Unpredictable, delicious and flamboyantly stunning: Parallel Mothers reviewed

Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a film about identity, secrets, lies, buried skeletons, real and metaphorical. But what you mainly need to know is: it is wonderful and delicious and blissfully styled — Almodovar doesn’t do ‘neutrals’ or Uggs — and constantly surprising. With most films you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first ten minutes. Oh, it’s that film. But here we’ve often no idea what direction it’s going to take and although the focus shifts it never feels fragmented. Instead, it all adds up to an immensely rich, satisfying whole. Almodovar is, above all, a director who loves women – young, old, dead, alive, beautiful, odd-looking The

Ten films about the build up to the second world war

Netflix’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ political thriller Munich – The Edge of War attempts in part to rehabilitate the reputation of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (played by Jeremy Irons), popularly believed to be the architect of appeasement in relation to Hitler’s Germany. Nick Cohen, in the pages of The Spectator attempted with some success to rebut the revisionist apologia for Chamberlain. To my eyes, the crux of the matter is whether taking stronger measures against Hitler at the beginning of his dictatorship would have deterred him – or that Chamberlain’s accommodations with the Nazis provided vital time to build up Britain’s armed forces and acclimatise public opinion to conflict

My clash with Maureen Lipman

After my Unapologetic Diaries were published recently, I was apparently accused of offending several people. At a lavish Christmas lunch attended by celebrities, stars and a smattering of royals, I was mortified to find that my place card was next to one of my alleged victims. What should I do? Apologise? Grovel? What I had said in my diary was just repeating what a mutual friend had whispered to me about this individual. At drinks, I made Piers Morgan aware of the situation. He hooted victoriously, ‘Finally, I’m not the most reviled person in the room!’ then said he would save me further embarrassment by doing the unthinkable and swapping

Manipulative and sentimental but also affectionate: Belfast reviewed

After Artemis Fowl and Murder on the Orient Express you may have had concerns about Kenneth Branagh ever helming a film again — keep away, Ken, keep away! — but Belfast is plainly a different prospect. It is an autobiographical account of his earliest years growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, and it is heartfelt, warm and authentic even if it does sometimes tip into the overly sentimental and nostalgic. That said, it was good to see Omo washing powder once again. (It added ‘brightness to whiteness’, you may remember.) This presses buttons so deftly I welled up exactly as I was supposed to. Three times Branagh, who wrote

Robert Harris on Boris Johnson, cancel culture and rehabilitating Chamberlain

Robert Harris has long been on a one-man crusade to reverse history’s negative verdict on the architect of appeasement. He argues that it was Neville Chamberlain’s duty to go the extra mile for peace and give Britain the moral authority to fight Hitler in the second world war. ‘There seems to be a general feeling that he couldn’t have done much else. He bought us precious time.’ Now the appearance of an acclaimed Anglo-German Netflix film Munich — The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain, and based on Harris’s 2017 novel Munich, gives him the chance to bring his quixotic campaign to a mass audience. Born in 1957

Tech billionaires on screen: from Blade Runner to Steve Jobs

Billionaires (especially of the tech variety) are constantly in the news. From the ‘space’ exploration antics of Messrs Bezos, Musk and Branson to the guilty verdicts recently handed out to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and of course, the possibility of criminal charges against former POTUS Donald Trump (who still claims billionaire status, despite wife Melania’s current yard sale). Elizabeth Holmes will be the subject of Adam (Don’t Look Up) McKay’s upcoming biopic Bad Blood, with Jennifer Lawrence playing the suspiciously baritone-voiced grifter. Incidentally, Mark Rylance played tech billionaire Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up (2021), a character owing an obvious debt to the oddly enunciating trio of Musk, Zuckerberg, and

The unexpected brilliance of Don’t Look Up

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Don’t Look Up, the new satirical film on Netflix. It’s about a couple of American scientists who discover a giant ‘planet-killing’ comet that’s going to collide with Earth in just over six months. They try to warn the world about this existential threat but no one takes them seriously, from the President of the United States on down. Some people half- listen, but then get distracted by gossip or greed or lust, and when they do engage they come up with excuses, like pointing out the science is only 99.78 per cent certain, not 100 per cent, so why don’t we just ‘sit tight

I won’t ever look at cows the same way again: Andrea Arnold’s Cow reviewed

The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see cows all the time from the train and they just sort of lounge about, ruminating, don’t they? But this wants you to look, really look, at what it is to be a cow. And you do and you will invest. (Oh, Luma.) Arnold spent four years, off and on, filming Luma, a cow at a

‘Oculus Quest is really the way’: film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul interviewed

There always comes a moment in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul where you’re forced to scoop your brain up from the floor. In his last, Cemetery of Splendour, this occurs at the point where the sky is invaded by a colossal blimpish amoeba. You stare. Blink. Adjust eyes. It slowly dawns that you’re peering into a crystal-clear lake, cloudy heavens and whirring mitochondria in blissful, cosmic coexistence. Man, however, is weak. And the first time I was introduced to his films, one of the most significant, sensual, startling, transcendent bodies of work by any director this century, I fell asleep. ‘Amazing,’ beams Weerasethakul over Zoom. ‘Even I slept in my

Boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy: Slavoj Žižek reviews Matrix Resurrections

The first thing that strikes the eye in the multitude of reviews of Matrix Resurrections is how easily the movie’s plot (especially its ending) has been interpreted as a metaphor for our socio-economic situation. Leftist pessimists read it as an insight into how, to put it bluntly, there is no hope for humanity: we cannot survive outside the Matrix (the network of corporate capital that controls us), freedom is impossible. Then there are social-democratic pragmatic ‘realists’ who see in the movie a vision of some kind of progressive alliance between humans and machines, sixty years after the destructive Machine Wars. In these wars ‘scarcity among the Machines led to a

The surreal joy of putting words in an actor’s mouth

More than 200 non-US residents stood in the queue ahead of me. A grand total of four Homeland Security officers were on duty in the glass booths. I texted my ride to expect me in Arrivals in an hour, at best, and tried to compose the opener for my Spectator diary. I didn’t get far: after an early start in Cork, my long-haul flight from Heathrow to San Francisco and watching Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, my brain was scrambled eggs. Nearby, an elderly traveller fainted. The well-rehearsed response by the tired-looking staff suggested this is a daily, if not an hourly, occurrence. I read a few chapters of Donal Ryan’s novel

Stephen Graham drives this terrific, relentless, one-take film: Boiling Point reviewed

Boiling Point is a single-take drama set during a busy service at a London restaurant and it has to be the most stressful film of the year. I realise it’s early days, but if a more stressful film comes along I would be most surprised. If this film were a recipe, the first instruction would read: ‘Nerves, shred.’ Followed by: ‘Put in pressure cooker and whack the temperature up.’ It is brilliantly executed but also one of those films you can find compelling and engrossing while praying for it to be over. It stars Stephen Graham, that little powerhouse of a fella, who now serves as a kitemark, surely. (Has

The Spectator’s best films of 2021

The Power of the Dog: Cumberbatch is spectacular Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano. Read the full review here. The Lost Daughter: entirely gripping The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And: mothers aren’t necessarily motherly, and can feel ambivalence. You’d think it was unfilmable, particularly as the central character describes herself as someone even she doesn’t

How crazy was Louis Wain?

Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s Cat, there were the cats of Louis Wain. The Wain cat came in a variety of breeds and colours: black and white, tabby, marmalade, white and blue (sky blue rather than Persian). But it always had the same disconcerting look in its wide, glassy eyes with the dilated pupils. It looked bombed out of its tiny mind. The original Wain cat was a black-and-white kitten called Peter belonging to a young late-Victorian magazine illustrator and his sick wife. In 1884 the 24-year-old Louis Wain had married his sisters’ governess, Emily

Entirely gripping: The Lost Daughter reviewed

The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And: mothers aren’t necessarily motherly, and can feel ambivalence. You’d think it was unfilmable, particularly as the central character describes herself as someone even she doesn’t understand but, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal — it’s her directorial debut — and starring Olivia Colman, this film is entirely gripping. No ambivalence on that count. Colman could play a bedside table and somehow bring depth, feeling, an internal landscape It is carried by Colman who is tremendous, and is being tipped as a potential Oscar winner, if that matters. She is certainly now one