Film Event Highlights This month brings film seasons dedicated to JG Ballard and Chris Petit, and Manchester Film Festival returns with a bursting programme Words: Simon Bland Anomalisa
High-Rise
The Witch
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Director: Ben Wheatley Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans Released: 18 Mar Certificate: 15
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
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top scoffing your face, there’s more to March than chocolate eggs, you know. Head into HOME and you’ll find a selection of cinema treats that beat any religious-themed confection. The Manchester moviehouse is celebrating the May release of Ben Wheatley’s claustrophobic HighRise by scheduling a series of films celebrating the work of acclaimed author JG Ballard. Always (Crashing) (18-31 Mar) inspects the cinematic chaos of environments on the verge of collapse and resurrects Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (20 Mar), the unconventional The Atrocity Exhibition (25 Mar), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (27 Mar) and George Miller’s Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior (31 Mar). The same venue also explores the vulnerable and powerless with Voices from the Margins: Four Films about Contemporary Britain (18 Mar). Here you’ll find extraordinary shorts The Last Regal King Size, Thomas Hartley, The Slain and Murderous Injustice alongside an introduction from writer-director Gavin Scott Whitfield. Meanwhile, HOME’s Chris Petit season comes to a close with a handful of films from this unsung voice of contemporary British cinema. Expect Flight to Berlin (5 Mar), Unrequited Love (10 Mar), a London Labyrinth and Negative Space double-bill (11 Mar), Chinese Boxes (14 Feb) and Content (17 Mar). Outside of HOME, Manchester’s Hold Fast bar is screening a schlocky double bill of Frankenstein Conquers the World and Blood Devils (1 Mar), and the Humanities in Public festival explores gay culture with its Queer Story Showcase – ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’ screening event at 70 Oxford St (3 Mar). What’s more, the city’s central AMC, Odeon and HOME cinemas all play host to the Manchester Film Festival (3-6 Mar), where you’ll find a selection of feature film premieres, documentaries, short film showcases and film events all packed into one long weekend. Feature football doc Dennis Viollet – A United Man will kick things off, while among the short film highlights are Strange Weather with Maxine Peake (5 Mar), local filmmaker-actor Ben Price’s I’m Sorry to Tell You (5 Mar) and the world premiere of Break (5 Mar), starring Sir John Hurt. The festival is chock-a-block and bound to please cinephiles of any taste. FACT in Liverpool bring a few cinema greats back to the big screen. Disney’s soon-to-be-liveactioned animation The Jungle Book (5 Mar) is joined by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s nailbiting classic Psycho (6 Mar), François Truffaut’s seminal, stylish and highly influential Jules et Jim (13 Mar) and the tense Hitchcock thriller Rear Window (20 Mar). On second thoughts, there’s so much cinema fun this month, you could probably do with a little extra chocolate to nibble on. Enjoy!
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Review
Director: Robert Eggers Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie Released: 11 Mar Certificate: 15
It’s the near future, though it (deliberately) seems to be the near future as imagined in the 1970s. Dr Robert Laing (Hiddleston) has set up home in a lavish high-rise designed by a grand architect (Irons). Presiding on the 25th floor, he develops trysts with the higher classes and friendships with those relegated below, including a documentarian (Evans) keen to provoke the dangerous social situation between levels. Violence and disarray are but a ticking time bomb away. A go-for-broke adaptation of JG Ballard’s beloved novel, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise is a vigorous and ferocious blast through a dark, dystopian labyrinth that only lets up in a third act that starts to lag – mainly because its pummelling nature can’t help but eventually exhaust. The novel’s slower, icy detachment and alienation are reimagined by Wheatley and writer Amy Jump as a hedonistic whirlwind; imagine a lone location Mad Max film with less motors and more upper-class twits, as filtered through a cocktail of the creative sensibilities of Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Ken Russell. [Josh Slater-Williams]
The Witch has the onscreen subtitle A New England Folktale, and its end credits posit that it’s inspired by folklore, fairytales and journals from the time of its 1630s setting. First-time feature director Robert Eggers and his crew take a practically fetishistic route to evoking that time, incorporating period-accurate language, detail-perfect sets, hand-stitched costumes, and striking compositions heavily dependent on natural light. It’s ostensibly the scary tale of a banished, isolated family torn apart by the forces of darkness, but running concurrently at all times with the black magic and shady goats is an affecting moral drama regarding the devastating consequences that result from seeds of distrust. Visible witchcraft could plausibly have been left out of the film and you’d still have a portrait of mass psychological breakdown that disturbs in its own right. That The Witch’s events are set just a couple of decades before the Salem witch trials lends a delicious subtext to proceedings, making it as akin to the cinematic territory of The White Ribbon as it is to The Shining. [Josh Slater-Williams]
Time Out of Mind
Goodnight Mommy
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Director: Oren Moverman Starring: Richard Gere, Ben Vereen, Jena Malone Released: 4 Mar Certificate: 15
Director: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala Starring: Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz, Susanne Wuest Released: 4 Mar Certificate: 15
Homeless on the streets of Manhattan, George (Gere) lives in the same city as everyone else and in an entirely different world from them. Like another dimension overlaying the one occupied by those who walk the sidewalks on their way to homes and jobs and coffee shops, George wanders the same physical space while remaining separated from the crowd. Conversations happen all around him but always pushed off to the edge of the frame, the speakers half-obscured or altogether invisible. He’s there but noone sees him because noone wants to; even when they are forced to interact with him the disconnect remains. Without a home or a job, he doesn’t fit into the city’s machinery and spends most of the movie looking for quiet, in-between places where he can rest undisturbed. The film captures this alienated state so completely that by the end the average citizens strolling by seem foreign – Moverman draws the viewer into George’s world so effectively that the one they really live in becomes uncanny. [Ross McIndoe]
In a chic lakeside Waldviertel mansion, identical twins Lukas and Elias play with pet cockroaches and amble among their mother’s modernist furniture and creepy, blurry portraits of herself. She returns from hospital, bandaged á la Eyes Without a Face, and cruelly snaps that she needs quiet rest. Where has good old mummy gone? Gradually the boys suspect she’s not who she says she is – so naturally they have to restrain and torture her until they get some answers. The feature directorial debut of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy makes skilful use of mystery, shifting points of identification and slow pacing to create creepy tension. It’s an elegantly mounted film, ‘shot on glorious 35mm’ as an end credit boasts, with extraordinary bursts of violence. But while its Austrian morbidity and Shyamalan narrative-twist-among-the-cornfields grasp at deep thoughts about grief and perversion, the film feels a specious ruse to show extreme cruelty. If Problem Child filtered gorily through The White Ribbon sounds good to you, maybe this is your thing. [Ian Mantgani]
Hail, Caesar!
Anomalisa
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Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich Released: 4 Mar Certificate: 12A A film about the artifice of filmmaking, Hail, Caesar! is deeply and refreshingly self-referential. The protagonists of the Coen brothers’ films are often tormented by bad choices, and desperately trying to avoid the inevitability of their downfall. By contrast, our main man here is Eddie Mannix (Brolin), a studio ‘fixer’ whose job it is to make these types of problems disappear. So when the star of the studio’s major prestige picture (Clooney) is kidnapped by a group of communist screenwriters, it falls to Eddie to keep the film from going under. The rest of the movie consists of a tapestry of interlocking vignettes littered with big-name cameos, each a loving parody of popular 50s cinema styles. The tone is light and breezy (this is the Coens’ funniest film in over a decade), but there remains a sinister undercurrent behind the glamorous artifice. In the end, this rip-roaring comedy with a moral conscience may fail to expose the veiled intentions of the major studios, but it does a damn good job of showing Hollywood’s potential for high-minded entertainment. [Patrick Gamble]
FILM
Director: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson Starring: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan Released: 11 Mar Certificate: 15 Over the course of Charlie Kaufman’s cinematic career, he’s been fascinated with the complexities of the human mind and the vehicles – whether they be flesh or not – that carry them around. His new film (codirected with Duke Johnson) is a typically existential, but deeply affecting, foray into a world populated by stop-motion puppets who all share the same eerie expression and Tom Noonan’s monotone voice. That is save for the protagonist Michael (Thewlis), who struggles through this homogenised world until he hears another voice standing out from the drone (Jason Leigh as the eponymous Lisa). Brimming with wit, Kaufman and Johnson craft a tender and moving account of a man struggling with depression and crying out for any kind of connection. The animated puppets are wonderfully lifelike (reminiscent of Being John Malkovich’s stringed lovers) and conjure an uncanny sense of isolation and the joy of a bright spark in the darkness. Perhaps not as mind-bending as it might have been, Anomalisa is possibly more accessible for it – and certainly all the more profound. [Ben Nicholson]
THE SKINNY