Beast review – down-and-out MMA fighter film is predictable but still lands punches

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Directed by Tyler Atkins and co-written by Russell Crowe, this Australian feature follows a familiar playbook – but you’ll find yourself surprisingly invested Ah, yes: the promising fighter who could’ve been a contender, could’ve been a champion. But then life intervened: bad decisions were made, promises broken, the wrong paths taken. But what if the past came knocking on his door? What if our long-in-the-tooth hero could have another crack, set things right, get in the ring one more time? To say that Tyler Atkins’ Australian martial arts drama Beast plucks moves from a well-worn playbook is putting it lightly. This is one of those genre films in which nothing surprises in broad terms; it’s the small pivots and deviations that matter. Given the ring of familiarity surrounding everything, I was surprised to find myself as invested in the film as I was, particularly because so many chest-thumping sports movies are already out there, many of which I find about as intellectually engaging ...
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Hors du Temps (Suspended Time) review – lockdown memoir revives childhood bliss

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Olivier Assayas’ thinly disguised autobiographical study of a film-maker’s Edenic experience during Covid isolation is a civilised pleasure

Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne (very different, surely, from the stylish Assayas), who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going to be living there with his brother Paul (Micha Lescot) a music journalist and his new partner (Nora Hamzawi). Assayas uses what appears to be his actual home and in his opening autobiographical voiceover introduces us to the house and grounds - easily the best part of the film, actually - and in further personal sections dispenses with the fiction and talks about the “Assayas” family.

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