13 h. ago Lady review – outrageous mockumentary is like Saltburn on shrooms

With supreme entitlement, Sian Clifford’s Lady Isabella shines as ‘aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians’ in this barnstorming comedy Those of us pining for Sian Clifford since the end of Fleabag, in which she played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fierce sister, have been rewarded with an outrageous barnstormer in this bizarre mockumentary comedy, a feature debut for director Samuel Abrahams. Clifford plays haughty but troubled aristocrat Lady Isabella who welcomes a young film-maker into her gorgeous country estate (filmed at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk) with calamitous results, and the film plays like a scuzzier, shroomier B-side to Saltburn. Maybe it’s a bit reliant on Clifford’s overwhelming firepower of performance, and we have to indulge the way it cheats strict mockumentary rules about how exactly the camera comes to be where it is at every moment. But there are laughs and unexpected tenderness in this very peculiar sentimental education.Laurie Kynaston plays Sam, a pushy, insecure...

Events

26 h. ago Good Fortune review – An angelic Keanu Reeves rises above the muddle of Aziz Ansari’s feature debut

Seth Rogen and Keke Palmer fill out the supporting cast of this high-concept fantasy comedy that is sometimes profound and sometimes sitcommy

Politics

39 h. ago ‘She does terrible things’: what can a Marvel director do with Ibsen’s ruthless heroine Hedda Gabler?

She made her name with a horror reboot and a mega-budget Marvel. So what drew Nia DaCosta to the dour Norwegian’s work? We meet the film-maker and Tessa Thompson, who plays Hedda as a sexy, sultry, machiavellian messNia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson are reminiscing about the first time they met, at Sundance film labs where DaCosta was workshopping her debut feature, Little Woods. “Honestly, Tessa had a great vibe,” says DaCosta. “She was super open, super generous and very intelligent.” A smile creeps on to her face. “Like – that was a fucking relief.”Thompson gives a look of mock offence. “I really just like working with smart actors,” adds DaCosta, filling the silence. “Why did you assume that we’re dumdums?” asks Thompson, turning to look directly at her director, as they sit in a Soho hotel in London. “I didn’t,” she is told. “I was just like, ‘What a pleasant surprise.’ Who would have thought it? Not me.” Continue reading...

Events

2 w. ago Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight review – heartfelt child’s

Embeth Davidtz stars and directs, with outstanding performances from Zikhona Bali and seven-year-old Lexi Venter as Bobo as white minority rule endsThe screen actor Embeth Davidtz makes a great feature directing debut with this utterly heartfelt, beautifully shot and meticulously realised movie in which she also stars – clearly a passion project – showing a troubled world through the unjudging eyes of a child. It is an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s award-winning memoir of the same name, about her childhood in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the late 1970s, just before the election that brought Robert Mugabe to power, ended white minority rule and sent a thrill of fear through the world of the white farmers, including her parents, who saw which way the wind of change was blowing.There’s a lovely performance from seven-year-old newcomer Lexi Venter as Bobo, a smudgey-faced little kid left to run ferally and blissfully wild on her family’s disintegrating farm. This is a place where her ...

Politics

3 w. ago Please Don’t Feed the Children review – Destry Spielberg debut splices 1970s exploitation with YA fairytale

A band of roving, feral orphans – asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals – regret accepting a stranger’s act of apparent kindnessThis low-budget horror thriller comes with an almighty directorial last name, but Steven’s daughter Destry serves up precious little that is classically Spielbergian in her debut feature. Forget Dad’s signature childlike wonder; the youngsters in this post-apocalyptic outing – ostracised because minors are asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals – are completely feral, opportunistic and worryingly keen to kill. Spielberg’s film is a surprisingly nihilistic, if uneven, splicing of 21st-century young-adult and 1970s exploitation flicks.After making a break for the border, roving juvenile Mary (Zoe Colletti) takes up with a band of orphans squatting a nearby community centre. Leader Ben (Andrew Liner) is wounded during a botched armed robbery on a service station, so they take refuge in an isolated house....

Society

3 w. ago Seven at 30: David Fincher’s devilish thriller is a chilling immersion in evil

The grim serial killer hit dared to take a mainstream audience to a hopeless place despite pressure from executives and test screenings to sanitiseIt had to end with the box. It nearly didn’t.Before David Fincher received a draft of Andrew Kevin Walker’s script for his 1995 psychological thriller Seven, he’d sworn off the possibility of ever directing again, still reeling from his notoriously rocky experience on his debut feature, Alien 3, which had ultimately been taken out of his hands. (“I’d rather die of colon cancer than make another movie,” he colorfully put it.) Walker’s script had already gone through various permutations since 1989, most notably a twist ending that had been written out of subsequent drafts for being irredeemably bleak. Yet, the original version was the one that Fincher read and he was unwilling to compromise, despite persistent pressure from executives and test screenings that seemed to confirm that it was too bleak an ending. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘We noticed how those young women were so vilified’: Nadia Fall on her debut film, Brides

The Young Vic artistic director tells why she wanted to reframe the story of girls lured to Syria to join Islamic StateIn Nadia Fall’s debut feature film, Brides, two teenage girls run away from Britain to join Islamic State in Syria, after being lured by social media posts promising freedom. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was inspired by real-life events.Fall, the artistic director of the Young Vic, said: “I was doing a play with the writer Suhayla El-Bushra at the National [Theatre], and we were approached about making a film. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago Ghost Trail review – pain and paranoia as a Syrian refugee attempts to track down his torturer

Jonathan Millet makes his fiction feature debut with an ambitious slow-burn thriller that opens up a complex world of painThe face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016, having suffered torture in Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison, and the killing of his wife and infant daughter.Hamid asks expatriate Syrians if they know a certain man, showing them a hazy photograph, claiming that this is his cousin. In fact, it is a man who tortured him and Hamid is a member of a ring dedicated to tracking down Syrian war criminals all over Europe. Haunted, exhausted and unhappy, Hamid’s only real relationsh...

Events