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T he world of clothes is famously cutthroat and increasingly careless – the devil could currently wear most brands quite happily, given the environmental and humanitarian cost of producing pretty much anything. In Fashion Reimagined, self-styled upstart designer Amy Powney takes on global chains of production as she sets out to make an entirely sustainable collection after winning the BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund prize in 2017. Becky Hutner’s documentary charts this process, shadowing Powney and her team as they search the globe for fibres produced humanely, that can be spun and woven without leaving giant carbon footprints. They visit Uruguay, Peru, Turkey and Austria, meeting wool producers and cotton pickers, hang out with sheep and those much cuter shearable ruminants, alpacas. Powney’s journey exposes how little awareness there is about the lives our clothes have led before we come to wear them, or their extremely convoluted construction. Denim washing is explored, as well as Jacqua...

In a new series , we’re celebrating the films we loved that aren’t likely to dominate the awards race. Over the new few weeks, our writers make passionate arguments for the performances and craft that stood out to them, from blockbusters to arthouse and everything in between. When it comes to Awards Season, a lot of the Best Editing nominations get handed out to the films with the Most Editing. Fancy transitions, show-offy stitching of faux-long takes, rapid rhythmic intercuts, and juggling multiple characters or time periods all tend to draw the eye of voters. Those fancy edits do have their place, but great editing is also about the seams you don’t see – the precise timings and rhythms so vital to a work’s effectiveness yet so often unremarked upon by the casual viewer. Comedy features have historically been underrepresented in this regard, unless they are Adam McKay or David O. Russell films which overdose on Most Editing tropes. This is despite great editing in a comedy being t...

T he conquering of the decennial Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a cultural moment whose reverberations still haven’t even begun to be really felt. Not only for reasons of identity politics (few expected a feminist work by a 24-year-old Jewish lesbian to top the poll), but also in terms of the film’s form. I won’t go into any more detail on that masterpiece, though we all know that it is often dismissed as ‘boring’. Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The Cure For Insomnia is acknowledged by Guinness World Records as the longest film ever made . It runs for 85 hours, making Out 1 (13 hours), Die Zweite Heimat (25 hours) and Sátántangó (7 hours) look miniscule by comparison. Little is known about its content, though we know that it largely consists of Chicago poet L.D. Groban reading his eponymous 4000-page poem spliced, with intermittent porn clips and heavy metal videos upsetting the lull. I think the ...

W estern acclaim for East Asian actors can often be eclipsed by a love for the directors whose movies they star in. Take Song Kang-ho – the immensely popular South Korean actor who’s starred in 12 of his country’s highest grossing domestic films. Praise is more often directed at the terrific movies he’s in than a celebration of his craft. Beyond his collaborations with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho (who seemingly share joint custody of the actor), he’s collaborated with mainstream and arthouse talents like Kim Jee-woon, Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, and with his latest award-winning turn in Broker , Hirokazu Kore-eda. His peerless delivery of comedy and pathos gave him another win before Kore-eda’s found family drama, where he first proved his ability to forge and foster an unorthodox family unit united in a compassionate goal – even if The Host had 100% more sea monsters in it. Bong Joon-ho’s films have often made a game-changing impact in his home industry, with The Host being...

A nger is not something that can be faked in cinema. Few films harness anger into an energy; fewer are legitimate reckonings. Carl Franklin’s 1992 thriller, One False Move, is a reckoning of such power and intelligence that it’s a crime that it remains so under-appreciated. The film follows small-town Arkansas Cop, Dale Dixon (Bill Paxton), who finds himself facing off against a trio of criminals: Fantasia (Cynda Williams), Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) and Pluto (Michael Beach) who arrive in Star City after committing a string of murders in LA. Dale decides it’s the perfect opportunity to prove his mettle, as a cop and as a man. Dale seems a good natured, bumbling optimist, and in a lesser work, he might be the heroic cliché of the last good guy in a sea of corruption. But Franklin – directing a script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson – is well aware of the dangers of aggrandizing the police. There had been enough of that in the decades previous. The 1980s’ slate of American act...

In a new series , we’re celebrating the films we loved that aren’t likely to dominate the awards race. Over the new few weeks, our writers make passionate arguments for the performances and craft that stood out to them, from blockbusters to arthouse and everything in between. I n Hollywood, everything old is new again, so the current Regency resurgence is right on schedule. Thankfully, not everything is a Mr Darcy rinse and repeat. Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice switches 19th-century England and the Netherfield Ball for gay holiday destination Fire Island and a skin-baring underwear party at the Ice Palace. More than 200 years separates the two, but the bones of the relationships and class structure remain. Austenmania and contemporary adaptations of classic texts studied at high school ran parallel as two defining movie trends of the ‘90s, converging with Amy Heckerling’s Clueless . The latter is the benchmark for a modern take on Jane Austen and teen movie...

O ne fateful day in 1985, a black bear in the American state of Georgia ingested a duffel bag full of cocaine that had been thrown out of a plane by drug smuggler Andrew Thornton, discarded before he fell to his death. The inquisitive bear promptly expired, likely in agony, and its taxidermied body is now on display in Lexington, Kentucky. For his screenwriting debut, Jimmy Warden’s Cocaine Bear draws from this bizarre true story, but because that version would make for a genuinely horrible and fairly boring viewing experience, Warden and director Elizabeth Banks have instead made their coked-up CGI version of the 80s bear go on a murderous rampage as she searches for more cocaine to consume. Cocaine Bear gave itself a lot to live up to. The trailer truly promised a film for our times – a ravenous bear high out of her skull, lightly anthropomorphised by virtue of her newfound drug habit, leaping into a moving ambulance and doing a line off a severed leg. With the current horrorscape...

T he specter of the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami hangs over Japanese cinema, with many of the biggest hits and creators influenced by the disaster. Just as Nobuhiko Obayashi created a trilogy of films shaped by the twin disasters of that and World War II and creators like Hideaki Anno used it as basis for Shin Godzilla , each of the recent mega-hit movies from beloved anime director Makoto Shinkai are impossible to separate from the impact the disaster had on the director. He cited 3.11 as an inspiration for Your Name , and the topic is similarly broached in the weather-based disaster imagery of Weathering With You . Suzume is perhaps the most explicit film broaching the topic that clearly fascinates them deeply, with a retort on the human spirit breaking through to help another in tragedy, even if it doesn’t entirely pay off. Despite being two hours in length the film wastes no time getting into its road-trip across Japan. Before the titles even roll, high-school student Suzume mee...

O ne of the most anticipated titles from the 2023 Berlinale’s competition slate comes from German auteur Christian Petzold who reunites with actress Paula Beer, following her Silver Bear-winning performance for her role as the titular water nymph in the director’s folk myth-driven romance, Undine. Afire is the second instalment of Petzold’s so-called “elemental trilogy”, and marks a welcome change of pace for the director, who returns to his home turf at the Berlinale with a film that’s much lighter and outwardly entertaining than what we’ve come to expect from him. Two friends – Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel) – plan on spending some time at a cottage on the Baltic coast when their car breaks down, causing them to make their way through the forest on foot. Leon, an irritable writer mulling over the schmaltzy manuscript on his second novel, is intent on repeating the fact that the purpose of this sojourn is for work, while the more agreeable Felix, assembling a por...

2 0,000 Species of Bees, the debut feature from Basque filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, begins with a border crossing. In narrative terms, it marks the return home of Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) and her three children to northern Spain from France for a family occasion. In symbolic terms, it speaks to the film’s broader interest in the definitions and categorisations of daily life. Here is the line that divides one country from another, but what about that liminal space as you cross between the two? What happens there? At the beginning of the film, Ane’s youngest child (played with tenacity and skill by Sofía Otero) seems to hover in her own kind of liminal space. Later she will be called Lucía, but early on she is known as Aitor, or Cocó, both of which she hates. She doesn’t quite have the language for what she feels yet, but she knows that she isn’t the boy her family believes her to be. Her hair grows long and her clothes don’t betray any sense of gender expression – occas...

I n a Park Chan-wook film, anything can be turned into a fetish: the snap of a leather belt; the strings from a grand piano; the heels on a pair of stilettos. All these objects and more are subjected to the gaze of his camera in Stoker , the Korean director’s English-language debut, and a deliciously twisted coming-of-age film that toys with ideas of performance, gender and sexual perversity within the framework of a taut psychological thriller. Throughout his career, Park’s work has drawn numerous comparisons to the movies of Alfted Hitchcock, a filmmaker who likewise told tales of intrigue and suspense centred around similarly erotic elements. Many have noted the Hitchcockian influences that can be found in last year’s Decision to Leave , Park’s critically-acclaimed romantic murder-mystery, in its portrayal of a man’s unattainable quest to understand a woman whose own image seems to be in a constant state of flux. But it’s Stoker that is Park’s most consciously referential film, a...

T here are two documentaries about iconic female musicians playing at this year’s Berlinale. First up, Joan Baez I Am A Noise, and then Love to Love You, Donna Summer, co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Summer’s own daughter, Brooklyn Sudano. Both films are interested in exploring the multiple personas that exist simultaneously within artists of the size and influence of Joan Baez and Donna Summer. “How many roles do I play in my own life?”Summer ponders in an interview. Love to Love You, Donna Summer is an intimate portrait of an artist and the multiple roles she played for different people in her life, including raw conversations with her daughters and their experience of a loving, but largely absent, mother. Through archive interviews and audio interviews with Summer’s family and closest collaborators, as well as new footage of Sudano balancing making a film with getting to know her mother’s life more intimately than ever. Love to Love You, Donna Summer starts, conveniently,...

A ustere; elliptical; challenging; rigid. These are all terms that describe the cinema of German writer-director Angela Schanelec. Her latest feature, Music, is a puzzling formal exercise that may seem impenetrable even for those who are familiar with the filmmaker’s brand of highly serious post-narrative construction. The uninitiated are faced with the much more daunting challenge of committing to an opaque structure that, coupled with a glaring lack of exposition, make it nearly impossible to glean the links between the film and the Oedipus myth that has inspired by. Shot in true Schanelec fashion – lengthy, static, carefully composed shots, in this case depicting coastal and mountainous landscapes – the film traverses a not-so-distant past in Greece (signifiers in clothing and cars hinting at the 1980s) before moving to urban locales in present-day Germany. When the frame is not completely still and fixed on figures in the distance, slow yet precise pans follow the gestures of ha...

S aim Sadiq’s Joyland begins with a game of tag: a man draped with a white bedsheet listens for his nieces’ suppressed giggles, his wandering arms outstretched as he attempts to catch them. Yet undercutting the tenderness of the way the pair eventually collapse together in raucous laughter, the camera hovers too close, and the sheet feels as much like an invisibility cloak as an innocent costume. We wonder why the first time we meet this man, Haider – brought to life with an extraordinarily sensitive performance by Ali Junejo – it’s as a ghost in his own home. Off-screen, his sister-in-law’s water breaks. In a matter-of-fact voice, she tells Haider to bring the motorcycle around and informs her daughters (three of them, but she’s hoping this baby will be a son) that a neighbour will be over with lunch. Some odd and everyday machinery clicks into place: the birth of a child; the rules that define this family; husbands and wives; boys and girls. In this film we constantly see people t...

I n 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez joined forces for the retro throwback packaged as Grindhouse, a double feature (Tarantino directed motor-thriller Death Proof , Rodriguez did the zombie freakshow Planet Terror) paying homage to the good old days of the ’70s, when high-grade sleaze filled dingy cinemas. To really immerse audiences in the environment of these temples to filth, the Grindhouse presentation was broken up by a handful of trailers for nonexistent movies covering a wider spectrum of exploitation film — one of which has improbably reentered the news. Deadline has broken the news that Eli Roth will expand his merry bloodbath Thanksgiving from two and a half minutes to full length, with Grey’s Anatomy alum Patrick Dempsey (the one-time Doctor McDreamy) a surprise in the lead role. Roth will direct, working from a script by Jeff Rendell, cowriter of the original short — and bit player, decapitated while wearing a turkey costume — more than fifteen years ago...

“E very day, on every street, in every city,” grimly intones the narrator, “women are insulted, abused, threatened.” The voice is Abel Ferrara’s, and this is the trailer for his sophomore feature, Ms 45. We see a striking young woman making her way down a bustling New York City street, while a succession of cat-callers leer and jeer at her. Her beauty is otherworldly and her expression is hard to place – somewhere between high anxiety and vacancy. This is Zoë Lund as Thana, the titular Ms. “What’s her secret?”, Ferrara continues, audibly smirking. The trailer then goes on to outline, in a teasingly elliptical fashion, the film’s rape-revenge structure, giving a prospective grindhouse audience the rough idea. But it’s clear this is no ordinary exploitation quickie: the image of Lund dressed in a nun’s habit, lips painted blood red and wielding a pistol in slow-motion is more eerie than it is strictly sleazy. “What is she hiding?”, asks Ferrara. “Where is she going?” Zoë Lund led a t...

W hat do Elvis Presley, Mamie Till, and Weinstein scandal reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey have in common? All have recently received the Hollywood biopic treatment – in addition to Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, Emily Brontë, and many more. The biographical film is one of the hottest trends in Hollywood and shows no signs of slowing down, having contributed a slew of this year’s biggest and most acclaimed films, from Elvis to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The biopic itself is nothing new. It has been a production staple for most of film history, including classics like Judith of Bethulia (1914), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Raging Bull (1980), and Catch Me If You Can (2002). But starting in the early 2000s, the number of biopics produced in Hollywood began to grow – a trend which continued into the 2010s. Today the biopic is up there with the superhero movie as one of the biggest and most consistent types of film being made in Hollywo...