Hacks contains multitudes; at once it’s a giddy comedy, an unpredictable drama, and an endlessly fruitful sitcom, but more than anything, Hacks is a love story. Across five seasons, the personal and professional relationship of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) has...
Cinema has the power to shape perceptions of entire groups of people. People with AIDS are Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993); trans women are Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) or Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991); both are Jared Leto...
In Valeska Grisebach’s last film, from 2017, a German laborer in Bulgaria to work on an infrastructure project explores the hillsides around a Bulgarian village on foot and horseback, wandering through a rugged landscape populated by wary natives and rowdy outsiders, a taciturn loner...
Who doesn’t love a bit of Richard Avedon? You’ve likely seen the American portrait photographer’s fingerprints without realising just what you’re looking at – think Brooke Shields’ suggestively contortionist Calvin Klein ads, Charlie Chaplin with bared teeth and mimed devil horns, Marilyn...
You could imagine the high priest of bureaucratic cynicism himself, Franz Kafka, watching this film about a Christian-Conservative couple being passed through the meat-grinder of the Norwegian Child Services system and saying, “No, sorry lads, it’s too much.” The usually very...
When we talk about “set pieces” in relationship to cinema, we often think of a jaw-dropping, computer-assisted visual sugar rush that is primed to leave the audience banjaxed with a sense of breathless awe. In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s tremendously beautiful and wise new...
In a 2023 interview, Liam Neeson, who played Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jin in The Phantom Menace, chalked up his disillusionment with the ever-expanding number of Star Wars offshoots to their insistence on contorting themselves to the confines of television. “I’m a bit of...
Within a short time of being introduced to the budding kabuki performer at the centre of Lee Sang-il’s hit Japanese film Kokuho, a character cuttingly offers an observation about his trajectory: “Your beautiful face might consume you.” These words, paired with the...
It’s very rare that you catch a sighting of the c‑word in these august pages, but its usage is warranted in reference to one of the interviewees in Orban Wallace’s superb documentary Our Land, which examines the idea of the public’s...
Romy keeps fantasising about Samuel, and it’s implied that BDSM now plays some role in her marriage. But, as in many erotic films, the threat posed by desire is eventually smoothed over and neutralised. Her life returns to normal, and...
