John Lennon: The Last Interview review – Soderbergh imagines there’s no people with bland AI clipshow

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Succession of pointless AI-generated snippets does nothing for film about the artist’s final interview, which took place on the day of his murder Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers , Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death. The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of f...
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Chang’an review – animated Chinese tale of poet-warriors is spectacular work of art

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The historic capital of China is rendered in gloriously intricate detail, but this animated feature feels like a state-sponsored history lesson

The first thing you need to know about this animated feature from China is that it is 168 minutes long, or two hours and 48 minutes. That’s a lot of time to spend watching a story about Chinese poet/warriors from the eighth century, celebrated via a screenplay that’s dense with historical incident drawn from the subjects’ biographies. If you know nothing about this period of history, which unfolds during the Tang dynasty, you’ll certainly learn a lot, but you’ll need to pay close attention to the welter of journeys to far-flung provinces, battles fought in mountain passes, and characters of note met along the way.

The two main characters are governor and general Gao Shi (voiced as a young man by Yang Tianxiang, as an elder by Wu Junquan) and poet Li Bai (Ling Zhenhe and then Xuan Xiaoming). The latter was considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history, and the film honours him and his work by featuring dozens of his poems, often declaimed lustily by the character in various states of inebriation (he was a legendary drinker). Gao Shi was also a poet of some note apparently, but the film makes it clear he was not in Li Bai’s league. Instead, Gao Shi gets to basically narrate the story of his and Li Bai’s entwined lives in one long flashback, told to a visiting luminary over the course of a single night before a decisive battle. (Surely the storytelling could wait so that the elderly Gao Shi could have a good sleep before the fight?)

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