Category: cinema

Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne (very different, surely, from the stylish Assayas), who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going to be living there with his brother Paul (Micha Lescot) a music journalist and his new partner (Nora Hamzawi). Assayas uses what appears to be his actual home and in his opening autobiographical voiceover introduces us to the house and grounds - easily the best part of the film, actually - and in further personal sections dispenses with the fiction and talks about the “Assayas” family.

Paul is in a position to record radio programmes at home and gets started on a show about music stars who have died of Covid, starting with Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers. (For a second, I was hoping Assayas would break out some choice Stranglers tracks, with Paul playing air guitar. But sadly no.) Etienne has little to do but mooch about the place, musing on ideas for films. Etienne’s obsessive anti-Covid cleanliness soon irritates Paul who annoys Etienne with his cooking. But of course there are meals and laughter too.

Nothing illustrates the difference between French and British cinema more than this film. Which Brit director would be allowed to indulge himself or herself with this civilised, cultured musing? And to assume that of course there is a supportive home-turf audience for it? This is a film in which someone sits down and listens to a podcast with Jean Renoir talking about his father Pierre-Auguste Renoir – and it’s really interesting. Well, I’m glad that Assayas is allowed to do it.

Learning about the abuses of the church in the “dysfunctional Christian society” of 1980s Ireland amounted to a “collective trauma” that has still not been fully processed, actor Cillian Murphy said as a new film set against the backdrop of the Magdalene Laundries scandal premiered at the Berlin film festival.

In Small Things Like These, the Oppenheimer star plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man who accidentally becomes aware of abuse happening at the local convent in New Ross, southwest County Wexford, Ireland.

As a punishment for having sex outside of marriage, women in Ireland were for more than two centuries sent to restrictive church-run workhouses, where they carried out agonising unpaid labour and were shut off from society against their will. The Magdalene Laundries system went unchallenged until 1993, when unmarked graves containing remains of 155 women were discovered in the backyard of one of the institutions.

“I do think that it was a collective trauma, particularly for people of a certain age,” Murphy said about the impact of the revelations, at a press conference on the eve of the film’s world premiere. “I think that we’re still processing that.”

Directed by Belgian film-maker Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These is based on the short novel of the same name by Claire Keegan, which was a bestseller in Ireland and beyond when it was published in 2020. “It seemed like everybody read it,” said Murphy, adding that art could be a useful “balm for that wound”.

“I think the irony of the book is that it’s a Christian man trying to act Christian in a dysfunctional Christian society. And it asks a lot of questions about publicity and silence and shame, all of those things. But I really don’t think the duty of art is to answer those questions, it’s to talk to them. And maybe it’s easier to absorb than an academic report, or a political report.”

The film, which is the first Irish production to open the Berlin film festival, was adapted for screen by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, and produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity studio.

“I was out in the New Mexican desert with Cillian. I was sitting across from him watching what he was doing in Oppenheimer,” Damon said during a press conference in Berlin. “I had already called Ben and told him what I was witnessing and how incredible it was. A couple of days later Cillian told me, ‘I have my next movie I really want to do.’ And I said, ‘We are starting a studio. Can we be a part of it?’”

Murphy stars in the film alongside Emily Watson, Michelle Fairley and Eileen Walsh, the last of whom also acted in Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama The Magdalene Sisters, about the same abuse scandal.

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

The tangled mess that has all created will surely lead to a fascinating oral history years later but for now, with everyone involved fearfully and contractually insisting that the finished product is exactly as intended, all we have is a 110-minute head-scratcher, a baffling string of question marks that remain unanswered. A clumsy opener set in 1970s Peru is our first red flag, junkily directed and shoddily written, setting up our heroine’s absurd backstory which has something to do with spiders as well as spider-people. Thirty years later, she’s a paramedic working alongside Ben Parker (Adam Scott), also known to most as Peter Parker’s uncle, except for in this movie, or at least this version, with all references to Spider-Man scrubbed from the end-product. After a near-death experience she discovers that she can briefly see into the future which allows her to save the lives of three teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) being targeted by a madman who also has ties to her past.

With a script written by four people, including its director, SJ Clarkson, a location that’s mostly Boston doubling up as New York, and a lead who looks like she’d really rather be anywhere else, there is something sickly compelling about how disjointed and thoroughly incompetent Madame Web is, less as so-bad-its-fun Midnight Movie and more studio film-making in the 2020s at its very worst case study. The attempt to reposition it as a “suspense thriller” ultimately does the film more harm than good not just because there are absolutely no suspense or thrills here but also because if we were to take it as something more grounded, with no ties to the heightened superheroics of the world it comes from then we would find it even harder to suspend our disbelief throughout.

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself). It also contains some of the most egregious examples of product placement I have seen in a long time, the worst of which has Pepsi and Pepsi ads show up at key dramatic moments, including an entire final set piece involving the actual Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens (before a coda involving the characters enjoying some ice-cold bottles of Pepsi).

As teased by the trailer, Johnson is distractingly disengaged. She is an actor who can work so well if used in just the right way by just the right director, here showing us the real limit of her abilities, one of the most ill-fitting tentpole leads I can remember. There’s such misjudged lethargy to her performance, not helped by her co-star Sweeney, in bizarre schoolgirl cosplay, and a small, odd role for Zosia Mamet, three actors who play as far too internal and muted for the frantic urgency of a flashy film such as this. Their casting is just one of many baffling decisions made here, the most baffling of which is the removal of any Spider-Man reference, made seemingly late in the day. An entire subplot has Emma Roberts as Ben Parker’s pregnant sister about to give birth to a baby whose name is never revealed (we almost hear it might start with maybe a P in one poorly edited scene) while the finale awkwardly rushes through the three teens in superhero costumes in the future (all play characters from the comics, including Spider-Woman). There’s even a strange butchering of the classic line about power and responsibility, its words scrambled around like we’re watching some janky rip-off made by people afraid of legal action.

What the average cinema-goer is supposed to get from this unholy mess, made curious only after a read of its torturous Wikipedia page, is a mystery. Superhero films are not dead (just today the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine broke a YouTube record) but the age of superhero films like Madame Web surely is – soulless boardroom product made by no one who seems to care for no one who wants to watch.

Visual art, oddly, doesn’t always translate that naturally to cinema as a subject. Just as you don’t get the full impact of a painting from a coffee table book, the camera can impose a distance from the art at hand – a secondary perspective that isn’t really needed. Wim Wenders bucks that trend, however, in his marvellous Anselm Kiefer documentary Anselm (Curzon Home Cinema), which feels fully alive to the angular, nature-based textures of the German painter and sculptor’s work. It’s especially exciting as a study of process – of the grand-scale action that goes into the art’s own dynamic movement.

A large part of its reward came, on the big screen, from Wenders’ continuingly imaginative embrace of 3D technology. Now on VOD, the film loses that element but remains engaging for the connection it draws between Kiefer’s own thorny persona and the work itself, and its elegant bridging of the artist with his dramatised younger selves. As a documentary about an artist that makes clear how their vision emerges from their character, Anselm is not as scrappily candid as Jack Hazan’s 1973 landmark A Bigger Splash (Netflix), but belongs in that league just the same. Hazan’s film intimately traces the breakdown of David Hockney’s relationship with former lover Peter Schlesinger over a three-year period, and its effect on Hockney’s work and perspective. It alternates fly-on-the-wall observation with flights of overtly queer fantasy, serving its subject with a fascination that never feels fawning.

Corinna Belz’s plainly titled Gerhard Richter Painting (2011) is a more straightforward documentary that nonetheless feels just as illuminating on its subject’s work and sensibility – largely because it has the patience to stand by and watch as Richter prepares and layers his canvases (the procedural nature of the film proves rather riveting). It’s a relatively rare portrait, alongside those by Wenders and Hazan, of an artist who is famous in their own time. Halina Ryschka’s 2019 doc Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint is instead a dedicated effort to elevate the status of a female artist – the now celebrated Swedish abstract mystic – who never got her due by the time of her death in 1944. The documentary lacks Af Klint’s own radicalism, but it persuasively makes its case.

Other great artists of yore have to make do with the classic biopic treatment, with the same names surfacing repeatedly. Film-makers simply cannot leave Vincent van Gogh alone, for example. Kirk Douglas gave him a tortured brawniness in Vincente Minnelli’s romanticised but unabashedly gorgeous Lust for Life (1956); Willem Dafoe probably came closer to the mark in the recent At Eternity’s Gate, though fellow artist Julian Schnabel’s film was fussily overworked; and the elaborately animated exercise Loving Vincent (2017) simply lets the pictures do the literal talking. (Robert Altman’s 1990 Vincent & Theo, probably the best of them, alas can’t be streamed anywhere in the UK.)

Schnabel’s artist’s eye served his subject to more kinetic effect in his 1996 debut, Basquiat (Apple TV), assisted by Jeffrey Wright’s raw, restless performance as the doomed young postmodernist. I’ve always liked the stripped-down emotional volatility of Ed Harris’s Pollock, which captures Jackson Pollock’s stoic masculinity and his mania, and deservedly won an Oscar for Marcia Gay Harden’s seething Lee Krasner. There may be a National Trust beauty to Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, but it digs intelligently beneath the English complacency that JMW Turner’s canvases raged against. Julie Taymor’s Frida reflected the reckless visual iridescence of Frida Kahlo’s painting, though dramatically it was stodgier stuff – in sore need of the unbound sensual experimentalism that Derek Jarman so aptly brought to his gilded erotic ode to Caravaggio.

Artist biopics are often best off, however, when they take on less obvious subjects. At the intimate end of that scale, I have great affection for Maudie, Aisling Walsh’s tender, tactile study of arthritis-stricken folk artist Maud Lewis, beautifully played by Sally Hawkins. But the daddy of them all is Andrei Tarkovsky’s immense Andrei Rublev, a portrait of a 15th-century Russian icon painter that distils a whole national relationship to art, poetry and faith in its one brooding life story.

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Earth Mama
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Savanah Leaf’s gutsy, Bafta-nominated debut feature rests on a stunning performance by Tia Nomore as a pregnant woman in recovery from drug addiction, trying to reassemble her life and her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. It may sound like standard-issue miserablism, but there’s unusual beauty and humour in its worldview.

Manodrome
South African director John Trengove got much attention for his visceral queer coming-of-ager The Wound. Far starrier but shuffled straight to VOD, his new film also dwells thoughtfully on matters of toxic masculinity, following a young father-to-be (a fine Jesse Eisenberg) submerged into a male libertarian cult. Its observations on incel culture are blunt, but the film does have shivery impact.

Night Swim
A nice suburban family finds that their swimming pool is haunted – sure, why not? The latest Blumhouse horror effort mines some pretty stylish jump scares from its silly sounding premise, helped by the allure of its imagery: there’s something intrinsically cinematic about swimming pools, murderous or otherwise.

The blindsiding success of 2007’s Juno gave Hollywood an unusual new star, a young and outspoken stripper-turned-screenwriter whose very existence upended dusty industry expectations, and one who became hard to easily pigeonhole. Diablo Cody, who wrote her first hit screenplay before she turned 30, was rewarded with an Oscar, and within a profession where household names are rarer than rare, she became a minor celebrity, all eyes fixated on whatever her next move would be.

Cody’s follow-up – the poppy supernatural horror Jennifer’s Body – turned those cheers to jeers, an Oscar winner suddenly attracting the unfair attention of the Razzies (an admittedly heinous institution with a profoundly stupid voting record) and repelling that of audiences. The response was a mix of bafflement and bile and it was only years later that it started to find an audience as a Midnight Movie mainstay and the subject of thinkpiece upon thinkpiece praising its sly feminism and deeply underrated Megan Fox performance. Its stature has grown to the size that Cody’s new movie Lisa Frankenstein arguably only exists because of it, another high school-set comedy horror sold as the latest from the writer of Jennifer’s Body, a curious about-turn and an encouraging sign of how streaming access has helped transform misses into hits in recent years.

But while as a green light in itself, it’s the deserved win Cody was owed years prior, the actual result is not quite a slam-dunk for those of us watching, and for those of us who have been waiting, a wannabe cult classic that you’ll have sadly forgotten by the morning.

Like with the far superior (if still patchier than its keenest defenders would like to admit) Jennifer’s Body, Cody takes the elements of a classic monster movie and gives them a remix. This time it’s the late 80s, a period perfectly suited for Cody’s nostalgia lust, and our unpopular teenage girl protagonist is now Lisa (Kathryn Newton), struggling to find her place in a new high school. She carries a dark, lurid history (her mother was slaughtered by a masked killer) and would rather spend time at the local cemetery than at house parties, despite her new stepsister (Liza Soberano) trying to involve her. In a set of circumstances involving an accidentally ingested hallucinogen, an attempted rape and an eerie green thunderstorm, Lisa’s favourite grave is unearthed and a reanimated corpse (Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse) becomes a secret she has to keep hidden in her closet.

It’s very much the easy PG-13 gateway drug to Jennifer’s Body’s harder R-rated horror, a sprightlier, sillier film that isn’t just set in the 80s but demands comparison to the kind of adolescent comedy-horrors released back then. But director Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin, isn’t just aiming for the lesser-known comps (My Boyfriend’s Back, My Demon Lover, Teen Witch, Weird Science), she’s boldly trying to riff on Heathers and mainly conjure the spirit of Tim Burton, all the way down to the surreal suburban setting and a gothic animated sequence. There’s a real commitment to the bit, aided by Cody’s attention to detailed period references, but the film never reaches the lofty heights it aims for with some pacing that feels a little off and a script that’s slapdash when it should be slick. Lisa’s willingness to help her zombified new friend’s murderous quest for body parts never makes all that much sense given how grotesque and unresponsive he is and how relatively easy it seems for her to find acceptance elsewhere. We’re never that sure of who Lisa really is, styling aside, and Newton, who nailed the comedy-horror balance in 2020’s far more assured genre mash-up Freaky, feels similarly lacking in confidence. Her performance works in parts but it’s a note-perfect Soberano and a roaringly nasty Carla Gugino as her evil stepmother who steal the show, both more finely attuned to the tropes of the era.

The film feels a little trapped between two worlds, a tween sleepover comedy on the verge of full body horror, and so some scenes feel clumsily sanitised, as if an unrated DVD is on the way complete with gory excess, Cody’s spiky dialogue also feeling a little defanged by her need to hold back (her wildly underappreciated 2011 comedy Young Adult remains one of the finest, and nastiest, films ever made). Rather than proving itself as a rewatchable new favourite for a teenage audience of goth-lite Wednesday fans, it ends up more suited for their parents, to point and recall. To its credit, Lisa Frankenstein wears its inspirations on its black lace sleeves, never feigning true originality but there’s only so much looking back we can handle without things being pushed at least a little bit forward. In bringing a subgenre back from the dead, Cody and Williams could have used a little more life.