Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

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Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...
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Joy review – warm and intensely English portrayal of the birth of IVF

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London film festival
Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie form the unlikely trio who doggedly, quietly and courageously made the discovery that would change lives around the world

There is sympathy, warmth and directness – though perhaps not much in the way of explicit joy – in this intensely English true story that made headlines and changed lives around the world.

Screenwriters Jack Thorne, Emma Gordon and Rachel Mason, and director Ben Taylor, dramatise the heartache and strain and triumph that led to the first ever birth of what the press with a mixture of hostility and awe called “a test-tube baby” – that is, a baby conceived through in vitro fertilisation – on 25 July 1978: a little girl called Louise Brown (middle name Joy).

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