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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pamela Hutchinson |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity
The prolific Korean auteur’s minimalist story centred around four untrained actors working on a skit may lack the visual inventiveness of his last two features, but the real beauty is in the performances. 19 August 2024Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film FestivalEven when working at his recent rate of two features per year, Hong Sangsoo still manages to surprise.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Chris Neilan |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity |Pamela Hutchinson
“It’s everyone’s responsibility, because we are all linked to this story.” Saint Helena, an isolated island a thousand miles from the coast of west Africa, a British colony since 1659 and Napoleon’s place of death, was for centuries accessible only by ship.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Pamela Hutchinson |Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity
Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film FestivalAndy Warhol’s debut film Sleep (1963) captured his lover John Giorno slumbering for more than five hours. Now from Radu Jude comes Sleep #2, which is considerably shorter, but culled from a year’s worth of webcam footage of Warhol’s grave – here the subject also sleeps, according to a more finite, poetical definition. It’s a desktop film, as the digital artefacting and wandering watermark attest, but also an observational piece.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Roger Luckhurst |Tom Charity |Pamela Hutchinson |John Bleasdale
After the ponderous metaphysics of Prometheus (2012) and slightly too much robot flute-playing in Alien: Covenant (2016), the Alien franchise returns under the director Fede Álvarez, who sure-footedly revamped The Evil Dead (2013) and provided the thrills of Don’t Breathe (2016). Álvarez delivers a back-to-basics approach for Alien that is a standalone retelling of the primal plot of Scott’s original but full of echoes and call-backs to prior outings of xenomorphic mayhem.
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Aug 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tom Charity |Pamela Hutchinson |John Bleasdale |Anton Bitel
The small-town murder probe remains a fertile subgenre in literature, film and TV, whether it’s novelist Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown (2021), or the Tasmanian devilry of Deadloch (2023-). No matter the continent, these backwater crime scenes tap into the insular and incestuous nature of rural life, the closely guarded secrets and the sometimes proudly held conviction that ‘society’ ends in the suburbs. Country folk look out for themselves.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Arjun Sajip |Tom Charity |Rebecca Harrison |Catherine Wheatley
Halfway through writer/director Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 spaghetti western The Harder They Fall, there’s a seemingly throwaway bit of dialogue: Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler), who fancies himself as the fastest gun in the West, brags, “Like they say in the Book of Clarence, ‘Can’t no man outspeed me.’”This slightly incongruous line was, it turns out, a carefully laid Easter egg for Samuel’s new film, The Book of Clarence, which transforms the director’s apocrypha into big-screen gospel.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Tom Charity |Rebecca Harrison |Catherine Wheatley |Henry Miller
Ethnography is deeply rooted in the traditions of the European film festival circuit and the arthouse sector that developed alongside it, a project espousing cultural curiosity and paying lip service to diversity, but somewhat shaded by post-colonial whitewashing. Nevertheless, it has to be an encouraging sign that filmmakers from Bhutan (The Monk and the Gun, 2023), Nepal (Shambhala, 2024) and, in this case, Mongolia are finally getting homegrown films noticed at an international level.
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Feb 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Tom Charity |Katie McCabe |Catherine Wheatley
Like the Venom films and the ill-fated Morbius (2022) – plus the upcoming Kraven the Hunter – attempts to make something out of the grab-bag of Spider-dependent characters Sony have the rights to.
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Feb 13, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Kim Newman |Tom Charity |Katie McCabe
Mads Mikkelsen makes a convincing bid for the A-list as a retired Danish soldier who dreams of becoming Europe’s first ever potato magnate in Nikolaj Arcel's stately period piece. 13 February 2024By Adam NaymanThe title of The Promised Land refers – with no little irony – to the hard, windswept heath being claimed by a penniless but enterprising Danish soldier with designs on extracting its putative bounty.
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Sep 4, 2023 | 
cinema-scope.com | Tom Charity
By Tom Charity. Published in Cinema Scope #96 (Fall 2023). “All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was recorded 30 years ago.
