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Showing posts with the label Film | The Guardian

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review – fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy chases past glories

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Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion Eddie Murphy isn’t finished yet – as he proved with his barnstormer of a performance as Blaxploitation pioneer Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite Is My Name . But there’s something a bit tired and formulaic about this further go-around for his iconic Detroit cop Axel Foley from the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedy franchise which 40 years ago made Murphy an explosive Hollywood star – and whose catchy Axel F theme became an 80s anthem, duly revived here. He’s back for the fourth film, yet again leaving his Detroit turf to be a scruffy fish-out-of-water in the hilariously chi-chi world of Beverly Hills, yet again wryly noticing from the wheel of his car, on the way in, a montage of all the crazy California stuff, including a car registration plate reading: PRE-NUP. Axel’s grownup lawyer daughter Jane (Taylour Paige) is in Beverly Hills, menace
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Beating Hearts review – operatic French gangster film suffers from bloat

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Cannes film festival Gilles Lelouche’s new movie aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy but buckles under the weight of its own naivety Gilles Lelouche’s new film is a giant operatic crime drama of star-crossed lovers and hurt feelings; it’s very French, but aiming for some blue-collar Springsteen energy. There are some good performances, and a very serviceable armed robbery scene. But Beating Hearts suffers from a lack of subtlety and bloat, with an increasingly insistent cry-bully sensitive-macho ethic, and a colossally inflated final section belatedly reassuring us of the film’s belief in the power and importance of love. In the end it is sentimental and naive, particularly about the legal consequences of beating your husband half to death in a phone box, however abusive he has been. And I had a strange taste in my mouth after a late scene in which the heroine, working on the checkout of a supermarket where her boyfriend is employed in the loading bay, coolly tells the obn
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Saturday Night Fever dancefloor to be auctioned with $300,000 estimate

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Multicoloured floor is part of sale along with Raiders of the Lost Ark prop prototype and The Big Lebowski costumes So, how deep is your pocket? The dancefloor used in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever has been put up for auction with an estimated price of about $300,000 (£235,800). John Travolta, playing the role of Italian-American Tony Manero, strutted his moves on the multicoloured floor to the film’s Bee Gees soundtrack, which featured hit songs including How Deep is Your Love, More Than a Woman, Open Sesame and Stayin’ Alive. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/syklibN via IFTTT
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The Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera. Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in T
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‘I burned out – and started mowing lawns’: a reality-bending chat with Harmony Korine

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He rocketed to notoriety at 19 with the shocking film Kids. Now, at 51, he’s smoking two fat cigars for breakfast – and making retina-burning work with acids and infrared cameras. Our writer gets deep with the eternal enfant terrible Have you ever wondered whether the interview you’re about to read is actually real? Are you reading it thanks to your own free will, or are you merely set on a preprogrammed course that’s entirely out of your control? Is everything just code? Are we a simulation? These are the questions that arise when you spend an hour with director and artist Harmony Korine, who is the first interviewee I’ve ever had respond to one of my questions by wondering whether or not I actually exist. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/UsWMp7e via IFTTT
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Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1: Costner casts himself as wildly desirable cowboy

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Costner writes, directs and stars alongside Sienna Miller and Sam Worthington in a big vain slog up familiar old west alleys After three saddle-sore hours, Kevin Costner’s handsome-looking but oddly listless new western doesn’t get much done in the way of satisfying storytelling. Admittedly, this is supposed to be just the first of a multi-part saga for which Costner is director, co-writer and star. But it somehow doesn’t establish anything exciting for its various unresolved storylines, and doesn’t leave us suspensefully hanging for anything else. In fact, the ploddingly paced epic ends by suddenly accelerating into a very peculiar preview montage of part two, with Costner speeding around punching people we’ve never seen before – as if someone had accidentally leant on the fast-forward button and we got to watch the whole of the second section in 25 seconds. It certainly starts at a gallop. The various plot strands in Montana, Wyoming and Kansas entwine around a new white pione
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George Miller: ‘Where do I keep my Oscar? I swear, I don’t know’

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The Furiosa, Mad Max and Happy Feet director talks tap dancing, life as a twin and what he’d tell his younger self Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email What is the best thing about being a twin? The shared experience. We spent the first 20 years of our lives together every day. We both have a similar curiosity about the world, and he practised as a doctor for 50 years. His take on human behaviour was really amusing, funny and very wise. It was always interesting to have conversations with him, so we would just compare notes. It’s why I love collaborating with people because it’s always about the discourse. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Mgbesc5 via IFTTT
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Emilia Perez review – Jacques Audiard’s gangster trans musical barrels along in style

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A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition, but is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar. Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting he
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Scénarios review – Jean-Luc Godard collage is his final love letter to cinema

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Completed days before his assisted death, the French New Wave master director talks through his ideas as illustrated in his hand-drawn scrapbook Here is an intriguing footnote to Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary career - a docu-textual movie collage lasting just under an hour in two parts, or maybe two layers, completed just before his assisted death two years ago in Switzerland at the age of 91. His collaborator and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno calls it not the “last Godard” but a “new Godard”. In its way, this little double film shows us a very great deal about Godard’s working habits, and it’s a late example of Godard speaking intimately in his own person about his own creative process. Scénarios appears to have grown out of thoughts generated by his last film, The Image Book, which emerged in 2018 . Godard sketched out his storyboarded or scrapbooked ideas for a short piece, which would juxtapose images, quotations, musical cues and clips in his distinctive manner. Aragno edited
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The Surfer review – beach bum Nic Cage surfs a high tide of toxic masculinity

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An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk. The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves hi
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Oh, Canada review – Paul Schrader looks north as Richard Gere’s draft dodger reveals all

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Cannes film festival A dying director who fled from the US to Canada agrees to make a confessional film in Schrader’s fragmented and anticlimactic story Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in. The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for t
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The greatest dancer of all time? Fred Astaire’s 20 best films – ranked!

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On the 125th anniversary of his birth – and with a Tom Holland biopic in the works – we run down the finest performances in the Hollywood legend’s eight-decade career A semi-straight turn from Fred Astaire in this witty comedy drama. He is an American diplomat in London whose employee (Jack Lemmon) is renting a flat from a mysterious, organ-playing landlady (Kim Novak) who is widely suspected of having offed her husband. Astaire brings a touch of old-school sophistication, while he and Lemmon make for an appealing double act, trading gags rather than toe-taps. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Jhk1rCz via IFTTT
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Megalopolis review – Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring

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Cannes film festival Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects Everyone who loves cinema owes Francis Ford Coppola a very great deal … including honesty. His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated to his late wife Eleanor , has some flashes of humour and verve. Jon Voight’s scene with his bow-and-arrow shoots a witty dart. The film’s heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/PY4M8tS via IFTTT
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Rome, Open City review – Rossellini’s blazingly urgent masterpiece from a city in ruins

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Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist drama is unsparing in its depiction of the heavy price of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre. It was a film that used the so-recently-devastated real streets and people of Rome on location for a project on which Rossellini started script work well before the end of the war, building on ideas by screenwriter Sergio Amidei with dialogue contribution by the young Federico Fellini. Rome, Open City is revived as part of the BFI Southbank’s Chasing the Real season of Italian neorealism , along with the two other mo
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review – Anya Taylor-Joy is tremendous as chase resumes

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Cannes film festival Taylor-Joy makes a fantastic action heroine, facing down a hilariously evil Chris Hemsworth in signature high-speed fights ‘My childhood! My mother! I want them back!” With this howl of anguish, young Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, sets the tone of vengeful rage that runs through George Miller’s immersive, spectacular prequel to his Mad Max reboot from 2015 . Once again, there are the crazily colossal and weird convoy-action sequences which fuse the notion of “chase” and “violent combat” into a series of delirious high-velocity contests between motorbikes, 18-wheelers and armed parascenders all attacking and shooting at each other while fanatically zooming in the same direction. The vehicles themselves are what makes the Mad Max movies so very strange. Many films are called “surreal”, but these strange, ritualistic gladiator-vehicle displays in the reddish-brown emptiness really do look like something by Giorgio de Chirico or Max Ernst . Furiosa is the ori
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The Second Act review – Quentin Dupieux’s likable meta comedy of actors’ private lives

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Cannes film festival With help from an A-list cast, Dupieux brings his customary mischief to an amiable tale of imposture and role play Cannes can always do worse than choose a comedy for its opening gala, and the festival is off to an amiable, entertaining start. Quentin Dupieux brings the wackiness onstream with this cheerfully mischievous, unrepentantly facetious fourth-wall-badgering sketch. It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it. It is all just one unbroken skein of experience like the endless dolly-track (the temporary rail that lets the camera move smoothly) that Dupieux finally shows us. There are plenty of laugh lines, though The Second Act would be a bit thin were it not for the rich, creamy thickness of the alpha-grade Fre
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Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire review – Brit gangster throwback gets imperial

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Michael Head stars in this less than convincing story of a London crime lord and his associates There was a period in the Cool Britannia days when you couldn’t throw a brick at a cinema in the UK without hitting a British gangster movie with a castful full of dodgy geezers blagging their way around an underground scene full of drugs and farfetched capers. Some were ludicrously entertaining creations of actual working-class talent, such as Nick Love’s The Business , others transcended genre pigeonholing to work their way into various top critics’ lists (such as Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast ), and still others were Guy Ritchie movies. There were hundreds of less high-profile efforts too, destined for VHS or DVD, but each having somehow found funding. These days the British gangster flick is no longer flavour of the week, or month, and there’s something appealingly bullish about attempts to make these films now. Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire is exactly the sort of film that
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‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’ Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year battle to film Megalopolis

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The director has spent half his life and $120m of his own money to make his sci-fi epic. Just days ahead of its debut in Cannes, some of his crew members are questioning his methods ‘My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject, and I am doing it,” Francis Ford Coppola said in 1978. “I will tell you right straight from the most sincere depths of my heart, the film will not be good.” The film was Apocalypse Now, and it was good, and the rest is history. Part of that history has been Coppola’s reputation as an intrepid adventurer who was prepared to risk everything, to defy the studio suits, to go to the brink of ruin and madness, all for the sake of art. The making of Apocalypse Now cemented that legend – the epic scale, the jungle insanity, the heart attacks, the unbiddable weather and even less biddable actors – all of which was captured by his wife, Eleanor, in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness. Coppola’s anti-establishment a
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George Clooney to make Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck

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The actor will play the lead in a stage adaptation of his Oscar-nominated journalism drama from 2005 George Clooney is set to make his Broadway debut in a stage adaptation of his 2005 journalism drama Good Night, and Good Luck. The actor’s sophomore feature as director will be transformed into a play set to premiere in spring 2025. Clooney, who played Fred W Friendly in the original, will now take on the role of Edward R Murrow. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/eaTBA1F via IFTTT
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Hanging around: how Planet of the Apes became Hollywood’s most resilient franchise

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The success of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes shows how, for almost 60 years, the series has managed to sustain audience interest By pure hot-streak longevity, the most impressive feat in Hollywood franchising is the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and may – may – finally wrap up next year, after eight entries and nearly 30 years without a single continuity reboot. But true to the fictional history of the Planet of the Apes series, it may be the apes who ultimately inherit this title from the petty, small-minded humans. The original Planet of the Apes came out in 1968 – and based on first weekend box office and positive reviews for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest installment of a rebooted series that began in 2011, the series will probably remain when the first movie reaches its 60th anniversary in just four years. This may be the most purely resilient series in Hollywood. Yes, when you factor in reboots, the James Bond series has been kicking around
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Vaychiletik review – beautifully-shot Mexican folk music study in the high arthouse style

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A tender film about the music of Mayan descendants is hampered by the alofty adherence to a documentary aesthetic where nothing is explained This film about a flute player and farmer named José Pérez López from Zinacantán in Chiapas, Mexico, teems with beautifully shot images of folks playing music, embroidering, participating in days-long community rituals, and tending their crops of flowers in polytunnels – pretty normal everyday stuff. It feels a little more elevated because it affords a glimpse into the life of descendants of the Mayans who practice ancestor worship and polytheistic beliefs but also have shrines with Catholic saints. The film’s website has a handy chunk of text about Bats’i son ta Sots’leb, the traditional music of Zinacantán, described in fascinating musicological detail. It’s a shame that kind of explanatory background can’t be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, the subtitles and dialogue never even give the names of the people we are observing for most o
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