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I n her 1984 review of Stop Making Sense , Pauline Kael describes David Byrne as having “a withdrawn, disembodied sci-fi quality, and though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun.” While perhaps coming off as insensitive now, this sentiment regarding Byrne’s strangeness was widely shared by both his bandmates and critics alike since Talking Heads’ inception. Byrne’s struggle with social conventions and interactions has been a near-impossible topic to avoid when examining the otherworldly genius of the group and their outsider appeal. Forty years have now passed, and not only has A24 restored and re-released Stop Making Sense to commemorate the concert film’s anniversary, but the man behind the big suit now proudly identifies as autistic. Reexamining the film with Byrne’s neurodivergence in mind, the film dubbed  “the greatest concert movie of all time” concurrently becomes one of the greatest autistic narratives ever put to film. ...

I n the cutthroat world of corporate trading, there’s little room for sentimentality. Young lovers Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) seem cognisant of this, even as they carry on a clandestine affair after falling for one another while serving as Wall Street analysts at the same hedge fund. When the firing of a colleague creates a power vacuum, it’s assumed that Luke will step up to fill it, to the delight of the couple – until their boss Campbell (a woefully miscast Eddie Marsan) throws a spanner in the works by opting to promote Emily instead. While Emily promises to make sure Luke is next in line for a cushy project manager job, the new power imbalance in their relationship – along with the toll of keeping it a secret from their colleagues – puts considerable strain on the couple. In theory, this might set the stage for an interesting examination of gender and sexual politics in domestic and professional settings. How might Luke deal with feeling emasculated by h...

I n 2017, Alice Russell was attending Critical Mass, a London-wide movement of cyclists who reclaim the streets for mass rides of freedom and community. A passionate cyclist, she had been attending for years but this year something was different. “I started to notice on one of them that there were loads more kids wheelieing than I’d ever seen before. I just fell in love with them. They were so raw and rowdy and wild and beautiful and spectacular.”  These kids led Russell to discover Bikestormz , their own movement of group rides – one decidedly wilder, younger, and more expressive. Bikestormz also holds a more focused goal: to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds an alternative to crime, through promoting community in bike riding. Or as they put it: “Bikes up, knives down”. This is the focus of Russell’s debut feature-length documentary If The Streets Were On Fire.  Russell’s documentary is remarkably warm and hopeful. Beautifully shot scenes of graceful, darin...

W hen a music video director makes the jump to cinematic features, the expectation is that while they may experience some turbulence in adjusting to the demands of narrative, they can be safely counted on to goose the form by carrying over the freer experimentalism of shorts required only to complement a given song. But rather than push boundaries in terms of imagery or editing, Grant Singer’s accompaniments provide little more than Instagram-filtered framing for the persona-first pop stars who’ve rendered his services. If not for the fleeting presence of Sky Ferreira, there would be nothing in the unremarkable thriller Reptile to suggest any noteworthy background for its director, perfectly at home in the functional point-and-shoot flavorlessness of straight-to-streaming potboilers. Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.” Real estate stiff...

T wenty years ago, Australian filmmakers/sickos Leigh Whannell and James Wan struck gold when they came up with the shockingly simple concept of Saw. Two men with chained feet, two hacksaws, one way out – a billion-dollar franchise was born. Eight sequels of varying quality and one dire spin-off later , the Saw films have become known for their elaborately engineered torture traps and increasingly convoluted timeline, as well as the presence of Billy the Puppet and Tobin Bell’s signature raspy voice. But for the tenth instalment in the franchise, Lionsgate are taking things back to basics, recruiting longtime Saw collaborator Kevin Greutert (who edited Saw, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V and Jigsaw, and directed Saw VI and Saw 3D) and bringing back the exceptionally competent civil engineer/deranged murderer John Kramer. Since Kramer died at the end of Saw III, Saw X is set between the events of the original film and Saw II. After leaving poor old Adam to die in a grody bathroom, Kr...

A t a certain point in most every Marx Brothers film, all the building chaos and thinly spread drama suddenly comes to a stop – Chico sits down at a piano and Harpo picks up a harp and, for a few minutes, they just play. This might seem strange, especially in 1931’s Monkey Business when it comes a scene or two before the climax, and maybe it’s not surprising that their most acclaimed film is one of the few without a musical interlude. But Jonathan Richman, one of the first to recognise the genius of The Velvet Underground, thought they were worth dedicating a whole song to. In ‘When Harpo Played his Harp’ he asks the most important question: “if someone else can do it, how come nobody does?” Every few months, someone, usually from outside of the online film space, will post about sex scenes. They will complain of their gratuity and how they do nothing to further the plot, as if projecting their disapproval to an uncomfortable parent sitting next to them. Then, naturally, everyone wi...

  Act 4 There is neurodivergent (ND) solace to be had within all of Anderson’s works – perhaps because you can take a scene at random and find a stratum of information encoded in the images, dialogue, performances, set decoration, editing, soundtrack and overall rhythm. This glut of harmoniously arranged creativity serves as a sensory stimulant, with every moment offering intense magnetism to a viewer otherwise subject to executive function lapses. I had been slightly terrified about how Anderson would respond to a piece that seeks to map such a specific set of interpretations onto his work. I asked how he felt that this piece was being written. His response put paid to the terror and galloped off to a place where there is no stigma, only appreciative angles. “How do I feel? You know, the interesting thing is people who identify as neurodivergent often have particular focus in their perception of things, a different way of processing information. I like the idea that there’s ...

T he strangely evolving trauma that is experiencing by a man who was sexually abused by his own father plays out in the grimly compelling, Greenland-set Kalak, the intriguing new film by Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf who debuted in 2018 with the sunnily-violent psychodrama, Holiday. Perhaps taking some of its thematic cues from ’90s Danish classic, Festen, in which an abusive patriarch is finally toppled by his anguished brood, Kalak (which translates as the pejorative expression, “Dirty Greenlander”) is a film more interested in charting the different ways that the psychological fall-out from such behaviour can manifest in what appears to be a well-adjusted husband and father. Jan (Emil Johnsen) has uprooted his family – wife and two pre-teen kids – so he can work as a duty nurse in the understaffed and under-resourced township Nuuk in Greenland. Eklöf and cinematographer Nadim Carlsen capture the desolate, forbidding beauty of a landscape in which houses slot in between the...

  Introduction The most remarkable thing about Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums is that it moves to the rhythms of entertainment and is all the more devastating for it. The set-up foregrounds Raleigh St. Clair foetal on the sofa, having just found out that his wife has cheated on him many times. His experimental subject, Dudley, tries to uplift him with a word game, which in itself is moving as Dudley is usually found passively vibing. Only in the background does Richie slip into the bathroom to shave his beard and cut his wrists. Over the next 90 seconds, through the use of music, beat-matched editing, montage, homage to French cinema, character acting from an ensemble cast and Anderson’s signature tragicomedy, the screen is flooded with two extraordinary waves of feeling. The first is the loneliness of someone who has decided he does not belong to this world. The second arrives at the speed of family, friends and stalwart Dudley hot-t...

C limbing an electricity pylon is not an obvious metaphor for life. But, like life, scaling an electrical tower does present a certain level of risk. That’s what the opening scene of Clement Virgo’s adaptation of David Chariandy’s 2017 novel suggests, where we see two young, Black males gear up to make the ascent in what feels like an initiation task passed down from Francis (Aaron Pierre) to his younger brother Michael (Lamar Johnson). The tension established here between the two makes it feel like this film is going to be about peer pressure and sibling rivalry, but this is not the case. Instead, Brother is about family, masculinity, and the complex web of boundaries dictated by race and class. Although the film’s choppy narrative is hard to follow at times, we’re still able to appreciate the connection between Francis and Michael, through tender moments from the boys’ childhood: Francis often takes the role of father figure, protecting nervous Michael in their sparse Scarborough ...

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 ...