Tilda swinton

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

‘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

You’ll tire of the wackiness and the whimsy: The French Dispatch reviewed

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter