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T he cinema landscape for the current millennium is noticeably more infantile than the one that preceded it. Sexless good guys are stalwart and true, the bad guys are clearly definable by their giant purple heads and villainous 3rd act monologues, and the path to box office success is counting on adults embracing the childish joys of watching bad guys get smashed. When Miles Morales (Shamiek Moore) first came to the screens in 2018 in Spider-man: Into The Spider-Verse , it seemed like it would be more of the same. But instead, it became the crown jewel in the superhero landscape. Slick animation that paid tribute to comic book art while playing with texture, frame rates and rotoscoping to create a heart-stoppingly gorgeous and lovely tale of an Afro-Latino Brooklyn teen teaming up with a cohort of Spider-people from parallel universes to save the day. The sequel has everything that made the first film so special, but most thrillingly, it puts away childish things. There’s moral ambi...

N ew Wes, new merch. Just in time for Asteroid City to blast off in the UK and Ireland on 23 June, fans will be able to admire a range of original artwork of Wes Anderson’s eleventh release – as well as getting their hands on limited edition merchandise – in the capital. Asteroid City, the latest film from Isle of Dogs and The Grand Budapest Hote l director, takes place in a fictional American desert town around 1955, where the itinerary of their annual Junior Stargazer Convention does not quite go to plan… This special pop-up exhibition at 180 The Strand celebrates every artistic detail of Anderson’s new film, in a similar way to previous pop-ups . Visitors have the opportunity to see original sets, props, miniatures, costumes and artwork featured in Asteroid City. The exhibition is accompanied by trademark Anderson sounds and visuals – so the soundtrack for visitors’ TikTok videos imagining themselves in one of his films is sorted already. As well as experiencing the pastel-t...

W hen the unbelievably named Reality Winner printed out a classified intelligence report revealing Russian interference in the 2016 US election from her National Security Agency work computer and mailed it to the newsroom of The Intercept, she, “wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she said. An American linguist who served in the Air Force before taking up a translating job with an NSA contractor, Winner merely wanted her employer to stop broadcasting Fox News in the office all day. And she wanted right wing politicians and commentators to stop lying to the American public. Tina Satter adapts her own play ‘Is This a Room’ for her feature film debut, a chamber drama that, as with its theatrical counterpart, takes the entirety of its dialogue verbatim from the transcripts of Winner’s 2017 FBI interrogation at her home in Augusta, Georgia. It’s a neat device that highlights both the intensity and the farce of the investigation against her, and refutes the very kind of narrative ...

S tephen King’s 1975 short story The Boogeyman blurs the psychological and the supernatural. Unfolding entirely within the confines of a psychiatrist’s office, it purports to be the story that distraught patient Lester Billings tells about his three children’s deaths – and while Lester insists that they were all killed at the hands, or more precisely claws, of a creature that would emerge at night from the closet, from the consulting couch this distraught narrator also reveals his own racism, sexism, cruel attitudes towards childrearing and propensity to violence, enabling his story to be read in two different ways – even if, in the end, the monster will come out once more for Lester himself. Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman’s very free adaptation of King’s story lets us know from the start that there is a supernatural monster, revealed through the sound of its strange, human-aping voice (courtesy of Daniel Hagen) and occasional glimpses of its shadow and claws, as cinematogr...

W e all know how it goes down… The Cannes press corps spend ten days collating, speculating and algorithmically predicting in the hope that they can offer the inside track on the final-day prize-giving. And every year, like some bout of forced amnesia, we forget that the jury are in a bubble, have not interacted with a single word of the vast reams of verbiage that were lovingly placed into the public domain, and have gone their own sweet way. And that is how it should be, as it would be a tremendous bore if the consensus pick was always victorious. This year, Reuben Östlund and his jury were giving a vintage crop of films to adjudicate and, well, their task this year is certainly unenviable. One thing we can say, though, is that the chances of the Palme d’Or going to a duffer or some middling effort that all jurors liked but nobody loved are much slimmer than usual. Below, without further ado, are all the prizes from the 2023 festival. Short film: 27 by Flóra Anna Buda Camera d...

I n Which Side Are You On? , his 1984 documentary on the miners’ strike, Ken Loach focuses on the public spaces, the clubs and halls, where the miners and their family gathered, and the community culture they shared there: the stories they told, poems they recited, songs they sang, and family meals they served to all who were hungry. It’s a rosy, adoring view of pubs and clubs as explicitly, perfectly Marxist – a coal country – accented chorus rising in a single voice to inspire us all to a more perfect union.  Loach returns to one such space in The Old Oak , named for a local pub somewhere in “The North of England” (no location is specified, but the film was shot around Durham). The place is atrophied, with houses selling for four figures, the social safety net threadbare, and the remaining locals embittered; the film is the 86-year-old Loach’s expression of despair and desperate hope over the fate of his treasured Northern working class, perhaps lost forever to nativism and ...

L ike the other two legendary 1933 backstage musicals from Warner Bros (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) Gold Diggers of 1933 is a charmed convergence of individual talents, campy songs, elaborate spectacle and snappy dialogue. In all three, Busby Berkeley directs the musical numbers, with songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. The stars and character actors – many appearing in all three – animate scripts rooted in period details, and crucially, remain funny to this day. In Gold Diggers, I’m partial to Aline MacMahon as the unsentimental comic Trixie Lorraine and Ned Sparks as the hilariously serious producer Barney Hopkins. Yet what makes Gold Diggers more than timeless entertainment, turning 90 and fresh as a daisy in 2023, doesn’t appear in the official screenplay. The film was set to end with the schmaltzy ‘Shadow Waltz’ relegating the radical ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ to the middle. The screenplay also stipulates a final, diminishing reprise of the brazen satirical opening numb...

I ndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn’t the only film at Cannes 2023 to concern itself with archaeological derring-do, ancient artefacts, memory and mortality: Set among the tombaroli , grave-robbers, in 1980s Italy, Alice Rohrwacher’s divine La Chimera is an observant and comic portrait of a moment within Italian history, and an earthy, shimmering fable about the gravesites we walk over every day. Appropriately, it confirms Rohrwacher as a figure absolutely central to the continuing tradition – and thus the future – of cinema. La Chimera doesn’t belong in a museum, it’s a living one. The film opens with Arthur (Josh O’Connor) napping on a train in a dirty, rumpled linen suit, like an Edwardian Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in a tent in the Valley of Kings and is only now waking up in Umbria. A lapsed archaeologist played by O’Connor with halting Italian (written into the script) and touch of sunstroke, Arthur finds buried tombs with a dowsing rod and through visions – his ...

I n 1858, in Bologna, then part of the Papal States, carabinieri acting under the authority of the Inquisitor of Bologna demanded entry to the home of the Jewish merchant Salomone Mortara and his wife Marianna, and removed the couple’s six-year-old son Edgardo to Rome, to be raised Catholic in the House of Catechumens under the aegis of Pope Pius IX. Six years before, when the infant Edgardo was sick the Mortaras’ Catholic maid, fearing for the bambino’s immortal soul, had baptised him when no one else was in the room—she dotted his forehead with fingers wetted in a pitcher and invoked the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—making him a Christian and necessitating his removal from a home full of infidels. As argued in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David Kertzer (an eminent American historian of Italy, whose other major works focus on the complicity of the Vatican in the rise of 20th century antisemitism and Italian fascism), the subsequent scandal of the Mortara affair unde...

“G ardening is a belief in the future,” Narval Roth (Joel Edgerton) tells us in a measured voice over, as he – like almost all Schrader protagonists – scribbles away in his journal. “A belief in things going according to plan.” As the Master Gardener at the Gracewood Estate in New Orleans, he’s a man whose life is defined by attention to detail. He keeps a spreadsheet of all the plants in the garden, and when they’re going to bloom. The cottage on the grounds in which he resides is spartan and orderly. He occasionally attends dinner with his employer Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) and they might even sleep together. Life is good. Everything is going according to plan. His modest existence is upended when Norma’s estranged grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) arrives, and Roth is charged with taking her on as an apprentice. An orphan drug addict with no one else to turn to, Maya is offered a lifeline by Norma which she reluctantly accepts. A slightly hesitant Roth takes her under...

I t’s hard to know for sure how Abdellatif Kechiche felt when, for the first time in the history of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme D’or was awarded not just to him and his film, Blue is the Warmest Colour , but also to the two lead actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulous. He was certainly quick to lash out at them when they criticised his harsh working methods, especially Seydoux who, in an op-ed for Rue89 , he called an opportunist that was “fine-tune[ing] her image […] in endless calculated interviews”. Kechiche complained that his film was “sullied”, but despite some criticism, most notably a blog post from Jul Muroh , the writer-artist of the source comics, the success of Blue was exceptional. It ended 2013 on countless best-of-the-year lists, coming third in both Cahier du Cinema and Sight & Sound’s collated lists. Now, ten years later, Kechiche’s career has truly been sullied, and even his most acclaimed film looks awfully different. Blue’s graphic lesbian se...

S creenwriting how-to books will often include stern advice about jeopardy. You simply must include jeopardy! Create stakes, then raise those stakes. One guaranteed shortcut to this hallowed state of jeopardy would be to make your lead character a single mum. It’s like playing a computer game on the most difficult setting. One where you will be judged, underestimated and yet simultaneously expected to perform at almost superhuman levels. Delphine Deloget’s fiction feature debut Rien à perdre! stars Virginie Efira as Sylvie, a single mum to two boys: amiable teenager Jean-Jacques (Félix Lefebvre), and younger “problem child” Sofiane (Alexis Tonetti). She works nights in a rowdy bar, and appears to get little practical support from her two brothers, Herve (Arieh Worthalter) and Alain (Mathieu Demy). Tragedy strikes one night while she’s at work and unreachable, and as a result, social services get very forcefully involved in the family’s life. The film’s even-handed refusal to fully ...

I n their astonishing new feature De Humani Corporis Fabrica, filmmakers Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor once more tease and prod conventional definitions of the term “documentary”. In this instance, they ask whether it’s the human body itself that’s a miracle, or the work done by people whose job it is to repair the body when it breaks. De Humani Corporis Fabrica escorts us on a whirlwind tour of various Parisian hospitals and specialist units as seen through the shallow-focus eye of a tricked-out endoscopy camera. Once through the doors of each institution, we then burrow deeper, into the cloistered privacy of operating theatres and, occasionally, inside the damaged bodies of the patients themselves. The first thing this film does which is of particular note is that its purpose-built camera has synched sound, so it is not only able to pick up the symphony of boggy squelches that come when forceps are pulling at flesh and organs, but also the comically banal conversation...

I t’s likely that none of us will have bestowed upon us the epithet, “The Napoleon of Something Something” within our lifetimes. Yet epicure extraordinaire, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), has already earned the nickname, “The Napoleon of Gastronomy”, and with good cause. For he and his cook/lover Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) dedicate their dawns and dusks to fashioning meals and menus, all to be tested on a “suite” (Bouffant’s squad) of magnificently-wasted local gourmands. We’re in an idyllic southern French countryside at the tail-end of the 19th Century during the pomp of revolutionary chef Auguste Escoffier. The industrial revolution has bore such fruits as ice-cream makers, turbot kettles, and all manner of kitchen gadgets for poking, scraping and slicing. One may swoon as Eugénie spreads ice-cream in the middle of two sponge cakes with a gorgeous-looking and oversized wooden paddle, clearly made specifically for the task. And their gigantic range cooker comprises the centrepi...

T he very idea that there now exists in the world a new feature film by the long-absent Spanish director Victor Erice is a cause for celebration in and of itself. That the feature, named Close Your Eyes, also happens to stand shoulder to shoulder with the works upon which he made his name, supremely-lyrical stories that explore the profound intersections between landscape, history and art, such as Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and The Quince Tree Sun, is nothing short of a miracle. The yarn at the centre of Close Your Eyes is one that is unfurled with utmost precision and no great haste. Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) is a one-time filmmaker and armchair intellectual who now resides in a beach-hut in a dowdy coastal marina. We are shown a segment of an unfinished film he made that he was forced to abandon – called The Farewell Gaze and which counted as one of its leads the great, forceful screen presence, Julio Arenas (José Coronado). Miguel is forced to cast his mind back to the makin...

W hen Catherine Parr married King Henry VIII, Brazil was a young country at 43. At that point, the Portuguese were still vigorously tearing at South American land and people alike, the violent ripples of colonisation writing in blood the bleak early history of the country. Almost three centuries would go by until Brazil left its subpar status as a colony to enter its short-lived monarchy era, with the seven-year stint of the Portuguese crown a risible attempt at establishing the small European country as one of the great white colonisers.  Despite a meek regency, Brazil – and great part of South America – have long cultivated a quizzical obsession with the idea of monarchy, with the English crown topping the ranks of curiosity. Just two years ago, Chilean director Pablo Larraín tapped into this strange cultural phenomenon with Spencer , a film rooted in the compassion offered by many Latinos to a woman shattered by power structures far too familiar to the colonised.  With ...

A t this point, the only phrase more bone-chilling than “Suella Braverman policy” is “Disney live-action remake”. Sludgy, ugly, pointless ways to squeeze every last bit of cash out of over-tired parents and Disney adults with nostalgia for when their imagination was captured by beautifully crafted, hand-drawn animation and a litany of originally composed bops. While The Little Mermaid surpasses recent artless remakes of The Lion King and Aladdin , that is a very low bar to clear. Halle Bailey is fantastic as Ariel, and Daveed Diggs delightful as Sebastian the crab, but it’s still a late-stage capitalism slog. Bloated from the original’s 83 minutes to 135, the hour mark passes before Ariel and the sea witch Ursula even meet and make a deal to exchange her voice for 3 days on land, to get true love’s kiss before sunset, or submit to being Ursula’s possession. Even with Bailey’s charms and euphonious rendition of ‘Part Of Your World’, it’s hard not to long for some sort of lunar eclip...

T he last time Wes Anderson took us on a class trip to the theatre, optional safety glasses and earplugs were provided to all patrons. With his scintillating and archly metafictional new work, Asteroid City, he allows us to bask in the frivolous delights of a play, while also carefully dismantling the process of artistic creation in real time. It’s the type of film you might imagine the great Max Fischer himself might have directed had his scholastic brief encompassed a bells-and-whistles homage to mid-century pulp science fiction. It is, on one level, an adventure picture about the possibilities of deep space exploration, about meek extraterrestrial visitors, the family unit in crisis (of course!), and a slew of beautiful lost souls succumbing, at the expense of love, to the allure of the working life. Or more specifically, a love of making things with your hands. On another level, it is a moving paean to the actors whose expressive faces, whose Chablis-dry line deliveries, and who...

I n 2009 Jessica Hausner presented Lourdes at the Venice Film Festival – a film about the French town which has become a revered sight of pilgrimage for many Catholics after visions of the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared in 1858. For what it’s worth, my Catholic high school ran an annual trip there for the more devout students. I never went. It seems fair to suggest Hausner has returned to the overarching theme of faith in her sixth feature, albeit with the curious allegorical framing of a disordered eating club which is formed at an elite high school, where new teacher Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is installed to teach the pupils about “conscious eating”. While Novak claims the practice of conscious eating has myriad benefits – including reducing carbon emissions, improving general health, and kickstarting the body into auto-cleansing – the reality is that her students are being encouraged to restrict their diet, eventually to the point they cannot eat at all. A couple of pupils qui...