Shopping for Superman

Shopping for Superman is a 50-year story of the neighborhood comic shops that are tragically dying off even though we need them more than ever. 

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Join or Die

“This is Bob. Bob is a big fan of clubs,” the narrator opens in the trailer for the forthcoming documentary Join or Die. “And this is a film about why you should join one and how Bob discovered that the fate of America depends on it.”

 Bob, or Robert D. Putnam, is an acclaimed political scientist who has deeply influenced our understanding of how society and government work.

Directed and produced by Rebecca Davids and Pete Davis, Join or Die follows “the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling” through Putnam’s work and interviews with numerous influential figures like Hillary Clinton, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and scholar Eddie Glaude, Jr. 

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Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Sakamoto is probably best known for pioneering electronic music in the late 70s and 80s as both a solo artist and as a member of electropop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. 

He also composed the Oscar-winning score for the film The Last Emperor (1987). Some of his other notable film scores include: The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), and The Revenant (2015). Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer in June of 2014. He went into remission but sadly was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2021. He passed away last year at the age of 71. 

 Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda was directed by Stephen Nomura Schible and released in 2017. 

 This is a portrait of an artist and a level of artistry that we don’t see much anymore. 

And watching it now, after his passing, feels even more important.

 

Napoleon: Directed by Ridley Scott.

Napoleon is a complex subject whose aura, monstrosity and genius is a perfect fit for great cinema and who is therefore an irresistible challenge for any serious film-maker.

 Little wonder then that Ridley Scott, who is now 85 years old, and whose long and prolific career includes many big, sweeping movies, has finally succumbed to the lure of the “little corporal” from Corsica.

 Napoleon is due in cinemas at the end of the month with Joaquin Phoenix in the leading role and a soundtrack which includes Black Sabbath (their classic dirge War Pigs) and a slowed-down Radiohead cover (The National Anthem – another dirge). According to the publicity, it promises to tell the life of Napoleon through his tortured love affair with his wife, Joséphine, his own jealousies and obsessions, as well as his master-plan to conquer Europe. From the trailers, it looks like another epic in the mould of Scott’s Gladiator, with at least some of the gripping battle scenes that are his trademark. 

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How did Ryan Gosling steal the Barbie movie?

The Oscar-nominated actor delivers a knockout comic performance in Greta Gerwig’s Mattel movie, playing on male insecurities and toxic masculinity. 

  Warning: there are spoilers here.

 

Asteroid City, Wes Anderson

To say that he’s done it again – yet again – is going to mean something different to fans and non-fans. 

But I have to say the first category is the only place to be for what is simply a terrifically entertaining and lightly sophisticated new comedy from Wes Anderson, in his signature rectilinear, deadpan style, with primary-pastel colours and his all-star repertory ensemble cast. Regulars including Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton are now joined by Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks, who have been welcomed into the droll Anderson fold.Asteroid City’s eccentricity, its elegance, its gaiety, and its sheer profusion of detail within the tableau frame make it such a pleasure. So, too, does its dapper styling of classic American pop culture. With every new shot, your eyes dart around the screen, grabbing at all the painterly little jokes and embellishments, each getting a micro-laugh.

 Peter Bradshaw

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“Caligula- The Ultimate Cut” at Cannes

Thomas Negovan wondered if his quest to restore and repair the famously mangled, pornified all-star 1979 production of Caligula was pointless and insane. Then the Cannes Film Festival told him they wanted it to debut there, and yesterday history was made. The new cut draws from 90 hours of footage and focuses on the performances of Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud. 

It's still a deranged, depraved and badly-shot film (unfocused and otherwise incompetent camera and sound work being one of the infamous problems for would-be editors of Caligula) but now it… well, it finally lives up to its original epic pretensions.

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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Pierre Földes

The seductively quirky sad-serious tone of Haruki Murakami is evident as a constellation of characters try and save the city – including a lost cat and a giant talkative frog.

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Donnie Darko at 20

A 20th anniversary is an odd one for Donnie Darko to celebrate: if any film should be granted eternal teenagedom, Kelly’s vastly ambitious debut feature is it.

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No Time to Die

"No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for."

 Peter Bradshaw 

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Lucy the Human Chimp review

Through the 20th century, the study of chimpanzees in particular was a way to learn about ourselves: how we might fare in space, for example, and how we might communicate in the absence of a common tongue.

 Lucy The Human Chimp, a new television documentary from HBO and Channel 4, explores the meeting of those worlds through the story of one unique relationship: that between Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as a human, and Janis Carter, a graduate student hired to clean her cage. 

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Oscars Predictions 2020

Photograph by Niko Tavernise 

The Academy tends only to acknowledge movies that reek of the self-important proclamation of serious intent. This Sunday, it will continue the same dull and pompous tradition.

 Richard Brody writes about the 2020 Academy Awards

 

Sundance 2020

 The Truffle Hunters by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw.

 

There are two types of people – those who have never heard of Studio Ghibli, and those who love the movies with all their heart.

Now that 21 films made by the legendary Japanese animation house are available to stream, David Barnett lists which films to watch, according to your mood.

 

Eleven films to watch in November

From Frozen II to The Irishman and Charlie’s Angels, Nicholas Barber picks the 11 films not to miss this November.

 

Is Bohemian Rhapsody any good ?

Mercury’s long-awaited biopic may be named after Queen’s superlatively innovative anthem, but it has barely a fraction of that song’s arrogant grandeur or adventurous spirit.
 It looks like a daytime soap opera and it runs through the same chord progression as every previous rock biopic.
In other words, some musicians get together; they record their greatest hits while wearing a succession of less-than-convincing shaggy wigs; and their fortunes rise, fall and then rise again.
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Everybody Knows

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in Asghar Farhadi’s psychological drama, which has opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

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Wes Anderson's Masterful 'Isle Of Dogs'

You have an opinion, probably, on which of the two most common species of household pet you deem superior — and an opinion, possibly, on the fastidious filmography of Wes Anderson.
 But this much, at least, is fact: Nobody ever made a good movie about the nobility of cats.
 Not even Anderson, who certainly seems like he might be a cat person, with his velvet-and-tweed blazers and his indoor scarves and his arched-eyebrow worldview. But no one will question his right-thinking canine-supremacy bone-a-fides after Isle of Dogs. (Go on, say the title out loud.)
 His dizzying new stop-motion epic is so visually rich, so narratively ambitious and so openhearted in its admiration for Japanese culture and the unshakable loyalty of doggos that it'll likely roll right over the familiar cries that Anderson is too fussy or whatnot like a Corgi rolling over for a belly rub.
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Think you know Mary Magdalene? Think again

Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus Christ Superstar. The Last Temptation of Christ. Just a selection of the films, television dramas and stage shows that have depicted Mary Magdalene as a fallen woman redeemed by the Son of God.
 A new film, though, flips the script to show Mary in a new light - as an independent free-thinker who bore witness to Jesus's death and resurrection and who deserves to be considered as an apostle in her own right. This is deeply contentious territory that flies in the face of the commonly accepted orthodoxy that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute. Yet Rooney Mara and Garth Davis, the star and director of Mary Magdalene, are prepared for whatever controversy comes their way.
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Isle of Dogs

The new Wes Anderson animation has premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. It deserves four stars, but it’s not for cat lovers, writes Emma Jones.