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Showing posts with the label Film | The Guardian

An Ordinary Case review – Daniel Auteuil directs and stars in tense Ruth Rendell-ish crime procedural

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A careworn husband is accused of murdering his wife in a story inspired by a real life case that dispenses with the genre’s familiar brutality Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, but one that is more stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of regular true crime. There is one gruesome crime-scene photo, but otherwise this could really have been based on something by Ruth Rendell. It is co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the original French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of material found on the corpse – or perhaps it means the thread of logic behind a legal argument, the loose thread which, if pulled sufficiently, might cause the whole thing to collapse. The action is based on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart , a criminal defence lawyer, who blogged under the name “Maître Mô” and who died in 2021. Grégory Gadebois plays Nicolas Milik (“Ahmed” in Moyart’s blog), a devoted, careworn husband to his alcoholic wife ...
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Alpha review – Julia Ducournau’s disjointed body horror is an absolute gamma

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Cannes film festival The winner of the Palme d’Or for Titane delivers Cannes’ first true turkey: the tonally inept tale of a girl with a dodgy tattoo and a disease that turns people to marble Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last … Julia Ducournau’s new film Alpha has to be the most bewildering disappointment of this year’s Cannes competition; even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can’t retrieve it. I admit I was agnostic about her much-acclaimed Palme d’Or winner Titane from 2021 but that had an energised purpose lacking in Alpha and Ducournau’s excellent 2016 debut Raw is still easily her best work. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/VaClJcw via IFTTT
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Highest 2 Lowest review – Spike Lee and Denzel Washington remake Kurosawa in fine style

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Cannes film festival Akira Kurosawa’s downbeat noir High and Low is retooled with Washington on magnificent form as a record producer whose godson is kidnapped by mistake Spike Lee has made a brash, bold, big-city movie with this pulsing New York adventure that doubles as a love letter to NYC’s sports and its music. It is a remake (or maybe cover version) of Akira Kurosawa’s classic downbeat noir High and Low from 1963, transplanting the action from Yokohama to New York – or rather returning it there, because the original source material, Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, is set in a fictional city based on the Big Apple. It’s got a terrific throb of energy and life, moving across the screen with the rangy grace of its superstar Denzel Washington – though a little of the minor-key sombreness and complex pessimism and cynicism of the first film has been lost and the modern technology of GPS (unknown in Kurosawa’s day) has indirectly left it with a very small plausibility issue. Cont...
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Nicolas Cage: ‘I don’t think a day goes by where I’m not mistaken for Nick Cave’

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As psycho-thriller The Surfer is released, the actor answers your questions about eating rats, loving pickled eggs and scaring Terry Wogan What do you remember of that appearance on Wogan? What was Terry like in real life? Have you still got that leather jacket, and the snakeskin jacket from Wild at Heart? johnnysmooth, EddieChorepost and BigAl65 I remember Terry Wogan was a very nice man and I enjoyed the interview with him, although I thought I was both obnoxious and somewhat wild. I guess it’s no secret that I was promoting a movie called Wild at Heart , so I was sort of play acting to that. I remember, as a child, I was in a car, a guy was walking down the street, and he had a leather jacket on and no shirt on underneath. I thought: “Well, that’s an interesting look.” I don’t know why that came back to me when I went on Terry’s show, but I thought: “I’m going to create that look again.” It was incredibly absurd and irreverent. I don’t have that leather jacket any more. I found...
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The Love That Remains review – startling tragicomic portrait of a fractured family

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Cannes film festival Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason examines a broken marriage through stunning imagery and quirky fantasy visions, but his new comic tone undermines the pain Icelandic film-maker Hlynur Pálmason gave us the haunting historical drama Godland and the challenging and bizarre thriller A White, White Day ; now he has changed things up with this startling, amusing, vaguely frustrating movie. The Love That Remains is a portrait of a fractured family and a sundered marriage which, with its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences to go with the dead-serious scenes of purported emotional pain, introduces a slightly disconcerting but certainly intriguing new comic tone. Pálmason’s visual and compositional sense is as commanding as ever, with some stunning imagery of the Icelandic landscape. But it is flavoured with a new tone of persistent, playful unseriousness, which finally morphs into a tragicomic spectacle of male loneliness. In some places this film ...
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The Phoenician Scheme review: Mia Threapleton shines in Wes Anderson’s muted new confection

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Benicio Del Toro and Michael Cera are essentially wingmen to Kate Winslet’s daughter, making a breakthrough big screen turn in Anderson’s enjoyable yet airless ensemble romp Wes Anderson has contrived another of his elegant, eccentric, rectilinear comedies - as ever, he is vulnerable to the charge of making films that stylistically resemble all his others, and yet no more, surely, than all those other directors making conventional films that resemble all the rest of their own conventional work. The Phoenician Scheme is enjoyable and executed with Anderson’s usual tremendous despatch, but it is somehow less visually detailed and inspired than some of his earlier work; there is less screwball sympathy for the characters, and it is disconcerting to see actors of the calibre of Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe and Scarlett Johansson phoning in tiny, deadpan, almost immobile cameos. But there is a likeable lead turn from Mia Threapleton, an eerie visual and aural echo of her mother, Kate Winslet....
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Die My Love review – Jennifer Lawrence excels in intensely sensual study of a woman in meltdown

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Lawrence excels as a woman whose bipolar disorder is exacerbated by husband Robert Pattinson’s infidelity, with super-strength direction from Lynne Ramsay Lynne Ramsay brings the Gothic-realist steam heat, some violent shocks and deafening music slams to this movie, adapted by her with co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh from the 2012 novel by Ariana Harwicz . It’s a ferociously intense study of a lonely, passionate woman and her descent into bipolar disorder as she is left alone all day with a new baby in a rambling Montana house originally belonging to her husband’s uncle, who took his own life in a gruesome way that we are not permitted to discover until some way into the movie. Die My Love is another film to remind you that Ramsay believes you should make movies the way VS Naipaul believed you should write books: from a position of strength. There is, simply, overwhelming muscular strength in this picture: in her direction, in Paul Davies’s sound design, in the saturated colour...
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Nouvelle Vague – Richard Linklater bends the knee to Breathless and Jean-Luc Godard

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Linklater recreates the making of the landmark French New Wave classic with an awestruck tastefulness that smooths over any disruptiveness Breathless, deathless … and pointless? Here is Richard Linklater’s impeccably submissive, tastefully cinephile period drama about the making of Godard’s debut 1960 classic À Bout de Souffle, that starred Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo as the star-crossed lovers in Paris. Linklater’s homage has credits in French and is beautifully shot in monochrome, as opposed to the boring old colour of real life in which the events were actually happening; he even cutely fabricates cue marks in the corner of the screen, those things that once told projectionists when to changeover the reels. But Linklater smoothly avoids any disruptive jump-cuts. It’s a good natured, intelligent effort for which Godard himself, were he still alive, would undoubtedly have ripped Linklater a new one. (When Michel Hazanavicius made Redoubtable in 2017 about Godard’s making of ...
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Bono: Stories of Surrender review – megastar tries out humility in likable one-man show

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Cannes film festival The U2 singer’s solo stage appearance sees him reflect on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz. Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid w...
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Hurry Up Tomorrow review – The Weeknd’s meta-thriller plays like a music video

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Visually effective yet narratively meandering, the star’s moody psycho-thriller-cum-therapy-session is a missed opportunity Regrets? The Weeknd has a few. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, a celluloid roman-à-clef pegged to his sixth studio album , the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate puzzles through the consequences of hooking up with a deranged groupie who forces him to reckon with his rock star flings. But it’s viewers who will probably be feeling rueful over nearly two hours lost in the end. Though technically a thriller, Tomorrow takes inspiration from a real-life moment of weakness: the Weeknd – born Abel Tesfaye – losing his voice while filming The Idol TV series in between a global stadium tour. As with most of his artistic efforts, the Weeknd makes the job of distinguishing his sincere reflections from his satirical self-observations impossibly hard on audiences and smirks when they don’t get the joke. Recall his dizzying Super Bowl half-time show and face-bandage stunt he pulled to p...
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Eddington review - Ari Aster’s tedious Covid western masks drama and mutes his stars

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Cannes film festival Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler have little to work with in this disappointing dud from the Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster now worryingly creates a losing streak with this bafflingly dull movie, a laborious and weirdly self-important satire which makes a heavy, flavourless meal of some uninteresting and unoriginal thoughts – on the Covid lockdown, online conspiracy theories, social polarisation, Black Lives Matter, liberal-white privilege and guns. The movie looks good, courtesy of Darius Khondji’s cinematography, but has nothing new or dramatically vital to say, and moreover manages the extraordinary achievement of making Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix look like boring actors. This is by virtue of its moderate script and by the unvarying stolid pace over its hefty running time which might have suited a 12-episode streamer. Eddington is a fictional small town in New Mexico in the US, bordering Native Amer...
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‘Men run away from vulnerability’: The Weeknd on blinding success, panic attacks and why The Idol was ‘half-baked’

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Abel Tesfaye is arguably the world’s biggest pop star – so why is he thinking of wrapping up the Weeknd? As he releases soul-baring film Hurry Up Tomorrow, he charts his path through drugs, heartbreak and abandonment Walking out to perform in front of 80,000 people and finding that your voice has gone: it’s the type of stress dream you have the night before a big work presentation. But for Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, it happened for real at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2022. “I ran backstage to find my vocal coach: I can’t sing, it’s not coming out,” he says. “And what I found out later on is that I was having a panic attack. It wasn’t a physical injury. It was more up here” – he gestures to his head – “than it was here” – his throat. The concert, which had to be called off and rescheduled, was the final night of a US stadium tour happening while Tesfaye was also wrapping up his painfully gestated – and eventually widely lampooned – TV series The Idol , which he starred in, co-wrot...
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Hurry Up Tomorrow review – The Weeknd’s meta-thriller plays like a music video

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Visually effective yet narratively meandering, the star’s moody psycho-thriller-cum-therapy-session is a missed opportunity Regrets? The Weeknd has a few. In Hurry Up Tomorrow, a celluloid roman-à-clef pegged to his sixth studio album , the Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate puzzles through the consequences of hooking up with a deranged groupie who forces him to reckon with his rock star flings. But it’s viewers who will probably be feeling rueful over nearly two hours lost in the end. Though technically a thriller, Tomorrow takes inspiration from a real-life moment of weakness: the Weeknd – born Abel Tesfaye – losing his voice while filming The Idol TV series in between a global stadium tour. As with most of his artistic efforts, the Weeknd makes the job of distinguishing his sincere reflections from his satirical self-observations impossibly hard on audiences and smirks when they don’t get the joke. Recall his dizzying Super Bowl half-time show and face-bandage stunt he pulled to p...
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Dossier 137 review – tense gilets-jaunes thriller divides cop’s loyalties over police brutality

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Cannes film festival A taut, charged procedural from Dominik Moll follows a conflicted officer investigating violence to a teenage protester Dominik Moll’s Dossier 137 is a serious, focused, if slightly programmatic movie about police brutality in France; there are docu-dramatic storytelling reflexes and a determined procedural tread. The movie takes its cue from the horrifying real-life cases of gilets-jaunes protesters in France’s 2019 demonstrations who suffered near fatal injuries due to the police’s trigger-happy use of the LBD gun : the lanceur de balle de défense or “flash ball” gun which (deafeningly) fires vicious rubber bullets. Stéphanie, played by Léa Drucker, is a conscientious police officer in the IGPN, the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale, effectively the Internal Affairs bureau, investigating horrific head injuries suffered by a teen protester, which could only be caused by the cops’ flash-ball weapons. She is divorced from a cop, Jérémy (Stanislas Merhar...
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‘We couldn’t tell if he was conscious’: Tom Cruise got stuck on top of biplane shooting Mission: Impossible sequel

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The star, who at 62 performed his own stunts for the forthcoming Final Reckoning, tells Cannes press conference ‘I don’t mind encountering the unknown’ Tom Cruise got stuck on the wing of a biplane shortly before it ran out fuel during the filming of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the director of the eighth instalment of the action franchise has revealed. Speaking to an audience at the Cannes film festival hours before the film’s premiere, director Christopher McQuarrie recounted the filming of a stunt sequence in which Cruise, in his long-running role as the field agent Ethan Hunt, walked between between the two wings of a biplane as the aircraft was mid-air over South Africa. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/pOBI39Q via IFTTT
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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning review – world-saving Tom Cruise signs off with wildly entertaining adventure

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Cruise does things his way in this eighth and last Mission: Impossible, as his maverick agent Ethan Hunt takes on the ultimate in AI evil Here it is: the eighth and final film (for now) in the spectacular Mission: Impossible action-thriller franchise, which manifests itself like the last segment jettisoned from some impossibly futurist Apollo spacecraft, which then carries on ionospherically upwards in a fireball as Tom Cruise ascends to a state beyond stardom, beyond IP. And with this film’s anti-AI and internet-sceptic message, and the gobsmacking final aerial set piece, Cruise is repeating his demand for the echt big-screen experience. He is of course doing his own superhuman stunts – for the same reason, as he himself once memorably put it, that Gene Kelly did all his own dancing. Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, ...
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‘We need to do something’: the company releasing Palestinian films no one else will

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As many films struggle to find distribution, Watermelon Pictures has stepped in to help tell stories from Palestine and other marginalized communities In March, The Encampments , a documentary on the pro-Palestinian protest movement on US college campuses, opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York. The nonfiction theatrical marketplace has never been breezy in the US, but this is a particularly difficult time for documentaries, let alone films about hot-button issues considered politically sensitive or, under the new administration, outright dangerous; one of the Encampments’ primary subjects, the Columbia University student-activist Mahmoud Khalil , remains in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge for any crime. Large-scale distributors, including all of the major streaming services, are increasingly wary of anything deemed controversial , leaving such films as Union , on the Amazon Labor Union, or the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documenta...
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Robert Benton, Oscar-winning director of Kramer vs Kramer, dies aged 92

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The writer and director, whose credits also include Bonnie and Clyde, Superman and Places in the Heart, died at his New York City home Oscar-winning writer and director Robert Benton has died at the age of 92. He won his two Academy awards for divorce drama Kramer vs Kramer . His longtime assistant and manager confirmed his death to the New York Times . Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/ZqjQOXI via IFTTT
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Gérard Depardieu found guilty of sexually assaulting two women

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French actor, 76, convicted of assaulting set dresser and assistant director during film shoot in Paris in 2021 Gérard Depardieu has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two women during a film shoot in 2021 and given an 18-month suspended prison sentence, in a turning point for the #MeToo movement in France. Depardieu, France’s biggest film star who has made more than 200 films and TV series, is the highest-profile figure in the French film industry to be convicted of sexual assault after years of the country being accused of being slow to take women’s claims of abuse seriously. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/XtKJHEg via IFTTT
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‘He’s not a monster’: Juliette Binoche talks Gérard Depardieu as verdict dominates start of Cannes

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Depardieu’s sexual assault verdict overshadowed first day of the film festival which once championed the actor, with jury president Binoche commenting on the ‘interesting timing’ Gérard Depardieu was the ghost in the wings at the opening of the Cannes film festival, after a court found the French star guilty of sexual assault. The Oscar-winning actor Juliette Binoche had barely begun her duties as Cannes jury president when she was asked to pass judgment on Depardieu and the wider culture of misogyny and sexual violence within the French film industry. “Interesting timing,” she said of the verdict. Depardieu denied allegations that he had sexually assaulted two women – a 54-year-old set dresser known only as Amélie and an unnamed 34-year-old assistant director – during production of the 2021 French drama The Green Shutters. But the judge ruled that the actor’s explanation of events was “unconvincing” before sentencing him to an 18-month suspended jail term . Depardieu’s legal team sa...
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Tom Cruise says mastering movie magic is about more than acting

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Speaking in London as he received a BFI fellowship, the actor praised Brando and Nicholson for knowing how to use ‘every tool’ of cinema From sleuthing around the world as Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible films to whizzing through the skies as “Maverick”, Tom Cruise has always known the difference a team makes. Now, the Hollywood superstar has told fledgling thespians to take heed of this approach on set and to understand the work of those behind the scenes who help make movie magic. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/TuA4yrm via IFTTT
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