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For those born after 1980, Trainspotting was a genre-changing, career-making, 1996 film that made us fall in love all over again with 80s punk music and feel empathy for a group of low-life heroin addicts. The sequel, the rather cutely named T2 Trainspotting, unapologetically replicates the original’s style and shows us what becomes of 20-year-old smack heads as they approach middle age. Continue reading
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It takes a while for this slow and quiet study of a man to hit its stride and to show its colours. We meet Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) as he goes about his job as a Boston janitor, at the beck and call of people in four apartment buildings. Lee seems shy and awkward but a few scenes show us it is perhaps a simmering anger that keeps him quiet. Interspersed with the monotony of his life, we see scenes of him on a boat with his brother and nephew and it is only gradually that we become aware these are flashbacks. A phone call brings him home to Manchester. His brother has died, leaving him the responsibility of his 16-year-old nephew Patrick. Continue reading
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After the delightful furore at the Oscars that saw La La Land‘s seemingly all white (and mostly male) entourage plough through their speeches for Best Picture only to be spectacularly replaced by Moonlight‘s nearly all black (and mostly male) contingent, it was with great interest that I sat down to watch this film. With Mahershala Ali being feted as the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar and Moonlight as the first LGBT movie to win Best Picture, I was expecting a film that would challenge white, conservative, heteronormative ideas. While Moonlight is a decent and worthy movie (if only for its all black cast), it was rather coy in its tackling of LGBT issues and Ali’s nomination, for what is a fairly small part compared to the substantial performances of the much lesser known Trevante Rhodes (Black) and Ashton Sanders (Chiron), says something, I think, about the benign paternalism of the Oscars. Continue reading
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If you have yet to see a Farhadi film, please go out and see one. He is a master at deftly weaving a story that propels you into a world both foreign and heart-breakingly familiar. About Elly, like A Separation and The Past, drops you into the middle of the ordinary dramas of a group of middle class Iranians. Continue reading
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I loved this film (thanks for the recommendation Kari). Sci-fi is not my favourite genre but this was directed by French-Canadian Dennis Villeneuve, who also made the superlative Incendies, so it is not your average US film. Stunningly beautiful, atmospheric, complex and emotional, it won’t be for everyone but I was clutched tight in its grasp and now, hours and days later, it still hasn’t let go. Continue reading
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Musicals can be hit or miss and I was skeptical about this one, as it seemed like a Hollywood Oscar vehicle and destined to underwhelm at the very least. Low expectations allow for pleasant surprise though and I was rather delighted with this sumptuous meditation on the seductiveness of nostalgia and the pain of moving forward. Continue reading
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This Italian chamber piece is set at a dinner party where a group of friends, new and old, couples and singletons, gather at the home of Eva and Rocco. After a discussion about secrets, Eva suggests they all lay their phones on the table throughout the meal; any calls or messages must be shared with the group. Continue reading
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This is an unexpectedly beautiful and thought-provoking film based on the true story of five-year-old Indian boy, Saroo, who becomes separated from his family. He is lost amongst the millions, one of 80,000 Indian children who go missing every year, and it is a 25 year journey before he has the chance to reconnect with his home. Continue reading
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Beautiful, heartwarming and heartbreaking, this latest from Ken Loach (Ae Fond Kiss, The Navigators), shows us the inhumanity of the British government welfare system or any bureaucratic system that takes choice and control about their own lives away from ordinary people. Continue reading
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