Finally released in German cinemas, The Critic stars renowned stage and screen actor Sir Ian McKellen. It is London, 1934, and McKellen is an infamous theatre critic called Jimmy Erskine. For fifty years Erskine has written biting theatrical reviews for respected national newspaper The Daily Chronicle. When the newspaper proprietor dies, his son David Brooke (Mark Strong) takes charge. However, Brooke wants to implement immediate changes to compete with its rival The Daily Mail. He also advises Erskine to tone down his writing style, and public proclivities.
Ian McKellen in The Critic
Meanwhile, struggling theatre actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton) also admires Erskine’s work. Therefore, she is upset by his cruel reviews of her performances, and this also infuriates Brooke. When Erskine is arrested for drunken and lewd behavior, the editor issues him a final warning. This will soon culminate in Brooke ending Erskine’s contract with one month’s notice.
Needing to save his job, Erskine watches Nina’s performance in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Brooke is also in the audience and Erskine notices him emotionally moved. Therefore he writes Nina the glowing review she has always wished for. However, this praise for Nina will come at a cost. In return, she must do him a favor and seduce the already besotted Chronicle editor.
The Critic is McKellen’s film, he almost singlehandedly saves it from oblivion. Although Arterton and Strong give excellent supporting performances, no other characters are foregrounded or resonate. Patrick Marber’s previous scripts for Closer (2004) and Notes on a Scandal (2006) had tangible sensitivity. However, in The Critic witticisms take precedent over progressive characterization.
Anand Tucker is multi-talented and experienced in all aspects of film production. Here, however, the effect is counter-productive. There is no conspicuous director imprint and so the trajectory becomes jarring. Indeed, The Critic premiered at Toronto IFF in September 2023 to mixed reviews. It was considered that the dark ending was unpopular with the audience. Therefore, the film’s distributor requested re-shoots. The September 2024 general release had a new cut and a new ending.
I placed Elem Klimov’s 1985 anti-war work Come and See on my watch list years ago. The film’s title comes from the Book of Revelation, “I heard the Beast say Come and See”.
When the restored print was released in 2020, there was universal acclaim for the 142-minute film. At times shocking, numbing, unforgettable, the director writer consciously acknowledges Aleksei Rodionov’s realistic camera work with startling character portrait compositions.
Aleksey Kravchenko as Florya
Come and See is the story of a simple Russian peasant boy with visions of adventures fighting occupying Germans along-side the resistance. The inescapable Hell on Earth brutality of World War 2 confronts fourteen-year-old Florya, an extraordinary performance from Aleksey Kravchenko, as youth evolves to a shattered existence.
Klimov’s Come and See is about human beings who stopped being human, just beings.
Prometheus gave man fire, and the Gods were not happy. Oppenheimer, the latest Christopher Nolan Film, is a war drama based on the Los Alamos Project, the race to acquire the Atomic Bomb. Based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the $100 million production follows Oppenheimer and his science team’s development of the ultimate weapon.
Cillian Murphy gets promoted from Nolan supporting player to lead as the conflicted egocentric work driven project head. The Irish actor makes of the most of his screen time by playing the man on an intense mission, unheeding the future consequences until too late. Emily Brunt as the bottle dependent Mrs. Oppenheimer had to have watched Deborah Kerr’s 1953 perfromance in the film From Here to Eternity for reference, drawing on the cruelty of her marital situation.
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer
Robert Downey Jr clearly has set his eyes on the Oscar Nomination playing Opeenheimer’s intellectual inferior yet cunning adversary Lewis Strauss. Mat Damon as General Lesile Groves comes across as forced, a blustering perfomance in a military uniform that was too big for the wearer.
What Actor would turn down a call from one of the top directors of his time? Clearly none. Nolan assembled top talent and names for the above the line ensemble, but there laid the problem. The key supporting characters intricately involved in the plot were overshadowed, forgotten. Bennie Safdie as a H-Bomb developer Edward Teller and Sadie Stratton as Mary Washburn had screen time, why? It is a case of wasting talent, not performances, rather, stock pieces.
Oppenheimer is dazzling film making on many levels, yet at times dazzling dullish, dazzling flawed and dazzling overwrought. At 180 minutes, Nolan’s screenplay kept the tension tight while seemingly going in small circles. Production values are top, camera work, editing and sound departments will certainly attend the upcoming technical awards ceremonies.
At a time when movie goers are experince super hero fatigue Oppenheimer shows audience want more than men in tights. Mr. Nolan gains praise for his work.
Instead of the giving Oppenheimer the title of Prometheus, perhaps Empimetheus, the God of Afterthought, would be a better. After all, The Greek Titan had the key to the Pandoras box. Look what happened we he gave it away.
Brands are brandishing green credentials for the sake of being caring, or at least on the surface. Green is the new Black Dress in fashion. Suddenly, designers and labels have become Earth Conscious. Walk down any main street or shopping mall, retailers are bragging about sustainable clothing lines.
During the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, Fashion Reimagined unspooled at the New York cinema gathering.
Becky Hunter’s documentary follows rural born designer Amy Powney’s quest searching for sustainable materials. The London based fashioner practices what she preaches, all the more remarkable because in the times of long, at times untraceable, long supply chains.
“Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change”. Frida Kahlo. How does an independent label afford costs associated sustainability? As the story unfolds, compromising seems to be the easiest solution. Amy and her Mother of Pearl fashion label team go from supplier to supplier with with hens teeth questions and requests for green goods. The quest leads to a South American supplier for wool. The viewer has to give the fashion designer a high mark for effort.
Hunter and Powney are on a stretch of terrain going from compelling to bordering on molly coddled righteousness for a moral cause. A wool sweater from Mother of Pearl retails for $500, not exactly affordable for many consumers.
Is Fashion Reimagined a soft commentary on disposable culture? No. More, a personal story about trying to be true to ones beliefs in the face of globalization and harmful production practices. Given the headlines about disposable fast fashion, cheering a dedicated fashion designer searching for an ethical way to produce clothes may not be a bad thing. Meanwhile, go online to buy a Mother of Pearl sweater on sale.
Short listed for the 2023 Oscar, ALMOST HOME is a the present day topical sci-fi short film from Nils Keller explores decisions and relationships in the future on spaceship.
A interview with director Nils Keller.
A very today reference set in the future, how did you develop this storyline?
The idea for ALMOST HOME was inspired by a newspaper article I read in March 2020 about a cruise ship’s odyssey due to the mounting fear of Covid 19. What really shook me was the mention of people who, after being trapped aboard their floating steel prison for weeks and despite the prospect of finally being able to leave it, wondered if it was safer to stay. Absurd at first glance, I immediately wondered what this might say about our lifelong struggle to draw a line between safety and freedom. The idea of using certain aspects of this article and turning it into a more universal short film story that departs from Covid’s reality and takes the form of a character-driven coming-of-age drama set in space evolved over the next few days.
Almost Home, the choices and conflicts in the story, you stayed away from the good guy, bad guy, can you explain this?
In creating the film, which at its core was meant to be a metaphor for our lifelong struggle to determine the right balance between freedom and security, two things were very important to us: we wanted to ask questions, not provide answers – and in order to achieve that, we wanted to create multidimensional characters with very good but very contrary intentions. Let’s face it: life would be so much easier if it consisted mostly of circumstances where there was a clearly good and a clearly bad option. But in fact, that is rarely the case. Most of the things we must decide on are tremendously complex and become even more complicated as more people are involved in the calculation and emotions as well as individual perceptions start playing their parts. The pandemic has given us a very global and painful example of this. And in some ways ALMOST HOME draws from this confusion while intentionally moving away from Covid itself and asking more general questions about growing up, handling social conflict, sharing and taking responsibility and navigating life-changing situations where it’s hard to know what long-term consequences will arise.
Why did you decide on a sci-fi film with CGI as a project, not exactly an easy choice.
As a director, my passion goes towards these grounded yet cinematic genre films that focus on the characters and highlight their drama. I think it’s one of the most magical powers of cinema that narrative distance can pave the way to talk about essential issues in our lives that would otherwise be buried under too many strange or personal circumstances, or too hurtful to address. I also like the entertaining and world-building part of genre narratives, where you’re a little freer to tell your story. In the specific case of ALMOST HOME, the main reason for setting the story in a futuristic and isolated environment was to distance it as much as possible from Covid 19. The spaceship is meant to provide a confined cinematic stage to reflect on what it means to be dependent – on our parents or other people who try to have a saying in our life choices – and how hard it can be to break away from that while not destroying the relationship. It’s that very physical yet metaphorical expression of not being able to run or hide. I wanted to focus on our characters and their dramatic conflict and see the larger implications of life in that.
Of course, we knew from the beginning that it would be very difficult, some even said impossible, to create a no-budget sci-fi film with so many challenging elements. There was an ongoing pandemic, little money, the need to build a full-scale walkable spaceship and tons of visual effects. On the other hand, the fact that we were students offered us a unique chance for support, funding and trying things out. People tend to love these passion projects and there were so many great filmmakers and supporters helping us with almost no payment involved. Among them companies like ARRI giving us their cameras and lights for free, our film school (the University of Television and Film Munich) etc. Since DoP Georg Nikolaus and I had done some commissioned CGI projects before, we were also confident, that this could be a manageable thing. Of course, everything turned out to be much more difficult. But thanks to the great team and the hard work of everyone involved, our dream didn’t crash but started flying. And it’s an amazing honour for all of us involved to receive such great feedback now on such a high level. It really is beyond our wildest dreams.
Obviously you worked closed with a veteran cinematographer, what was the relationship?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that Georg Nikolaus is a veteran cinematographer, even if he has the calm and many impressive skills of one. I think it was very important for this project that he and I know each other since the beginning of film school. We did almost all our short films together and worked on some commissioned productions for commercials and television together. There has always been a shared understanding that story and characters must come first when we think about visual language. In the case of ALMOST HOME, we discussed the possible layout of the spaceship early on to make sure we had the right mix of a narrative stage for our story and enough opportunity to visually approach the characters and their environment in an intimate way. Further down the road, we used the 3D model of the spaceship, created by our incredible production designer Pan Patellis, to work out literally every shot, the blocking and camera movements. The spaceship was so cramped, the shooting time so short and the technical demands so advanced, that we had to exactly know where to put the camera and determine what walls and ceilings had to be disassembled for certain scenes. Yet we also often took a step back from planning and considered how to visually help express Jakob’s emotionality and his longing for Earth as it felt important to convey a human and poetic note in a cold environment like ours. Through highlighting Jakob’s personal items with their used surfaces, the presence of the earth through moving sunlight glimpses through the windows with the blue marble in sight etc. As a result, there was a lot of planning together with the art department as well. We also stayed true to the idea of letting the camera playfully float at the beginning of the film where Jakob feels free and optimistic in zero gravity. Advertently, when gravity sets in, the visual language becomes as stiff as his body. In order to emphasise the relationship between Jakob and his mother and their shifting understanding of each other, we discussed every angle, inch and trick possible inside a confined set like ours. It was of incredible help here, that ARRI Rental supported our work with their amazing equipment like the ALEXA Mini LF, lights and much more. Later in post-production, Georg continued to be an integral part of our naturally understaffed project, having ongoing conversations about the right perspectives for visual effects, dispelling, preparing the colour grading, creating screen inserts, artworks etc.
ALMOST HOME has been shortlisted for the Oscar 2023.
Controversial. Shocking. Brilliant. These are some of the words use to describe Canes Film Festival winner Titane. For an episode of the Chat Cinema Podcast, we devoted the show to Julia Ducournau’s hardcore work.
Indie Road Flick Pooling to Paradise is an engaging and often fun critique on contemporary living. Married mum and step-mother Jenny (Lynn Chen) plans to travel to Las Vegas for a professional Blogger conference. Involuntarily she chooses the Car Pool option on her app. This means she will subsequently miss her flight. Joining her in the car are Kara (Dreama Walker), Sean (Jonathan Lipnicki), and driver Marc (Jordan Carlos).
Such an inclined space demands our attention. It’s also interesting to see how characters play off one another. Here are four strangers at different stages in their lives. We have already learned that Jenny is a highly-strung mother. The younger Kara is a struggling and deluded actor. The even younger Sean wants to kill himself after breaking up with his girlfriend, Dawn (Taryn Manning). Meanwhile, driver Marc is a casualty of activist parents. He now drifts through life with the help of numerous narcotics.
During the trip they inevitably get to know each other better. At one point Sean pulls out a gun. However, he reassures everyone it’s to kill himself, despite not being loaded. Kara tries to convince everyone she’s on her way to stardom. Jenny constantly talks domesticity like everyone would somehow be interested. Marc, having undoubtedly been in this situation before, goes with the flow.
An increasingly distraught Sean offers to pay Marc to drive him to Dawn’s home in Paradise, Nevada. With Paradise being near Vegas, and that she’s already missed her flight, Jenny agrees to Sean’s plan. Kara, with nothing better to do, also agrees to this to help Sean.
Pooling to Paradise is worthwhile but does not contain an abundance of laughs. It is more of a light drama with funny moments that continually raises the bar. The fun is in getting to know these characters better. There are also regular respites as they leave the car at different points in the journey.
The denouement has Jenny speaking at a conference. This somewhat feel-good sentimental ending is out of synch with the tone of the film. However, this minor flaw aside, it’s worth staying along for the ride. Writer Caytha Jentis shows good pacing and sympathetic characterization, while the dialogue rarely feels scripted.
