Month: June 2018

Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the type of movie that does exactly what it says on the tin. The highly descriptive 11-word title could as well function as a mini-synopsis of the film. This is a documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat around the years of 1978 and 1979, when he was just 18 and 19 years of age, mostly unknown. His talent was beginning to flourish and he was sensing that he was about to become a “very famous artist”. Basquiat was a teenager with great ambitions, ideas of grandiosity, a lot of talent and a very dirty mind. This is a film about an artist in the making.

It starts off with images of the derelict and filthy streets of New York during said years, all teeming with poverty, drug addicts and graffiti. This is pre-Giuliani, and there are no signs of gentrification, instead the metropolis looks hellish and post-apocalyptic. This is where the young Black artist began painting and scribbling. His childlike drawings and blocks filled with written words – almost invariably in public places – may look banal and immature to the least attentive, but in reality his work was anything but puerile. He coined the term Samo (short for “same old shit”), which became a widely used graffiti tag. But there was nothing old and unoriginal about such work. The acute political messages, the anti-racism statements, plus the commentary on colonialism and class struggle are all in there. The writing’s on wall.

The central pillar of this doc are talking heads interviews celebrating, sharing anecdotes and reminiscing about a very audacious artist who died at the age of just 27 to an overdose of heroin (the same age as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimmi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, all equally dirty). This is an intimate and romanticised portrait of Basquiat, as perceived by friends who liked and admired him enormously. Interviewees include Jim Jarsmuch (who refused to take part in the 1996 biopic Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel), costumer designer Patricia Field, Puerto Rican artist Lee Quinones, plus some of his close and less famous friends, lovers and associates. The artist himself is rarely heard. This third-person approach provides the late Basquiat with some sort of unearthly and uncanny quality.

On the downside, this is also a very esoteric film, and it’s unlikely to convert any new fans and admirers. A very conventional doc about a very unconventional artist. Not a colourful and pulsating piece of work, mirroring the pieces created by the flamboyant artist. It’s an effective and concise film product that does what it says on the label, without adding any new flavours and twists.

Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 22nd. It’s out on VoD on Monday, November 26th.

Genesis

Posted on by victorfraga

In an austere 2069, a devastated humanity seeks shelter from chemical Armageddon, where the air is breathable, the civilians survive in dire conditions, starving and pushed into slave labour. Dr. Eve Gabriel (Olivia Grant) dedicate all resources to the construction of Abel, a humanoid lifeform, and mankind’s last hope, though this too has unfortunate consequences. Then the robot develops thought and superiority to the creators who once designed it. The problem is Genesis lacks any visual style that differs it from a legion of other sci-fi knockoffs. It looks second rate and the plot is third rate with some excruciating exposition standing as snappy dialogue.

The film, however, is led by two magnetic leads; the ever reliable and handsome John Hannah is on top form, while Chike Okonkwo is steely and magnetic. Olivia Grant is, sadly, lumped with a colourless part which requires her to sound intelligent and do very little to advance the plot. It’s an unfortunate trope seen again and again in sci-fi cinema. Okonkwo has many of the best lines, stating that humanity does nothing but destroy – so why save it? His character, Abel, is tasked with collecting food supplies for Eden, but develops his own ideas very quickly. There are hints of nihilism here, that are ruined by visual panderings to laser beams and minor explosions, rendering a potential Beckettian space adventure redundant. Hannah too brittles with heroics, standing up to the threat of humanoid eradication with bristle and panache.

The film’s low budget is painfully evident in every action set piece presented, shot with ham-fisted camera pandering. What work much better are the interior scenes, where bunkered and starving for air, Hannah and Ed Stoppard can show their acting chops. But again, where can these thespians really prove their abilities when there are cheap looking space crafts to mount?

Ultimately, Genesis wastes an opportunity to film a nauseating and claustrophobic apocalyptic annihilation. Hannah and Okonkwo are strong, but the material is too poor for them to truly stretch the scales we know they can truly aspire to be.

Genesis is available for digital download on July 9th and on DVD on July 16th.

The Lodgers

Posted on by victorfraga

In thus classic ghost story set in rural 1920s’ Ireland, two orphaned twins share their house with sinister unseen entities that forbid them from leaving. Rachel’s encounter with soldier Seán sparks an insatiable urge within her and she acts to break the curse that traps both her and her twin.

This is a tale of two people growing in the natural world of the supernatural. As a model of the horror genre, The Lodgers still maintains the necessary chilly atmosphere an abandoned house should aspire. David Bradley, Charlotte Vega and Bill Milner star in a piece where desolate curtains flow without reason or rhyme, the ever growing cascades of stairs feels fittingly austere as the camera rises with the unease of Bunuel/Hitchcock of yore.

The hint of sexualised yearning of horror classics is pointed to as Rachel (Vega)’s encounter with war veteran Seán (Eugene Simon) sparks a sexual awakening within her. This is done with pertinence without resorting to crass performance and effect. David Turpin writes with cerebral prose and does his job of setting the horror within the claustrophobic interiors of a creaky house with nuance. The imaginative uses of angles in a shower of cavernous cuts and edits is also worth a mention. Cinematographer Richard Kendrick is the real star here.

Story-wise, the film shares much in common with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), David Lean’s seminal drama of an Irish married woman embarking on a sultry affair with a British soldier. Seán, a returning soldier, bears the brunt of being a British soldier in his hometown that no longer welcomes him. It’s all dubiously passé for a film set in 2018 and does little to advance the horror provoked in some of the genuinely scary scenes the film offers. It’s frustrating that another Irish film has a predominantly English cast, which takes from the realism the film should offer.

But there’s enough on display here to merit a watch from a visual standpoint. The decors are tastefully Gothic in design, the visually muted colours add to the viewer’s growing sense of unease and fear, while the film’s score is awash with Bernard Herrmann like cerebral strings, fitting for a horror film. With only his second film Brian O’Malley has proven that he knows how to put a niftily cut film together, but he is hampered by an unoriginal script and may be better off in future replicating a country he and I know with a better put together cast.

The Lodgers is out on DVD on Monday, June 25th.

The Happy Prince

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Opening, closing and running intermittently through this drama detailing Oscar Wilde’s final years is one of his best known children’s stories, The Happy Prince. It’s worth reading the story before seeing the film (it’s easily found online). The prince has died following a sheltered and pampered childhood and has been made into a statue covered in gold leaf and adorned with three precious stones. In the course of his friendship with a sparrow, the statue gives away his gold leaf and precious stones to poor people with the sparrow’s help and the sparrow dies. Statue and sparrow become the two most cherished things in the eyes of God.

An historical note: alongside achieving considerable success as a playwright in late British, Victorian society, Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensbury who was the father of Wilde’s lover Alfred Bosie Douglas. His legal action exposed Wilde as homosexual and led to two years in prison on charges of sodomy and gross indecency. This was how Britain dealt with being gay – or, as it was called, “the love that dare not speak its name” – back then. After his release, he left England in order to travel in Europe but he was a social outcast, his career had been destroyed and he died penniless. Only in 2017 was Wilde pardoned as one of around 50,000 men criminalised in their day for committing homosexual acts which have since been decriminalised.

The film has proved something of an odyssey for actor and star Rupert Everett who was fascinated enough by the man to write a spec script about Wilde’s final, post-prison years. It’s a highly personal affair which has taken some 12 years to bring to the screen and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than its writer and star directing it, no mean feat when you’re playing the lead role at the same time and appearing in 95% of the film.

As an actor, Everett inhabits Wilde’s skin and totally draws you into his character and world. You feel a mixture of empathy and disdain towards him. Yes, he’s badly treated by object of his affections Bosie (Colin Morgan) but manages to almost alienate Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), the one friend who sticks with him and, as we read at the end, paid off all Wilde’s debts after his death.

He completely abandons his wife Constance (Emily Watson) and two sons as well. Constance gets very little screen time, hardly any of it in her husband’s presence, but Watson commands the screen whenever she appears. Wilde himself aside, she’s the only character subjectively portrayed in the narrative. At one point she appears like a spectre in Wilde’s room. Shortly afterwards, he receives a telegram to say that she has died.

Colin Firth is apparently an old friend without whose encouragement Everett doesn’t think he could have made the film. Here he plays Reggie Turner, an old friend of Wilde’s who sticks with him through the bad times.

Elsewhere the film is populated with an amazing array of actors, among them Béatrice Dalle as a music hall type café owner who’ll take no nonsense, Anna Chancellor as a former admirer of Wilde when he was a successful playwright but now forbidden to talk with him by her brutish husband, Ronald Pickup as a judge and, right at the end, Tom Wilkinson as an Irish Catholic priest. All of which might have been terribly embarrassing, but Everett demonstrates a superb casting sense and the various actors fit their roles well.

In addition to Wilde’s own children who are peripheral to the proceedings, the parade of characters also includes a Parisian rent boy and his younger sibling, the latter hooked on hearing the next episode of Wilde’s eponymous, orally communicated children’s tale. That story might be seen as having echoes in the latter part of Wilde’s life with its obvious fall from grace and its protagonist’s move from a cosseted social position to one where he sees the world much more clearly from his new vantage point. However, every time you try to pin the narrative down to such a parallel, it doesn’t really fit: it’s somehow bigger than that.

The whole thing is an arresting portrait of a messy life in its final downhill spiral. While Everett doesn’t shy away from the gay subject matter, he never descends into titillation or showing us flesh for flesh’s sake either. Wilde may well have been a literary and artistic genius, but if this interpretation is correct he could be a pretty difficult human being at the same time. Everett doesn’t whitewash that in this warts-and-all portrait and his film feels all the better for it. If his performance as the man is striking, his abilities as a writer-director impress more in this tour de force.

The Happy Prince was out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 15th. It’s out on VoD on Monday, October 15th.

The Piano

Posted on by victorfraga

This moody gothic tale of a mute pianist’s troubled marriage in a remote New Zealand settlement cemented Jane Campion’s position as a thriving cinematic force and one of the most accomplished female filmmakers in history. With The Piano returning to cinemas, its themes of misogyny, sexuality and resistance make it a worthwhile subject of reevaluation.

One of the things that makes The Piano so distinct is that unlike so many contemporary films that feature a “strong female character” in the lead, Ada does not embody a hyper-masculine ideal of “strength”. She is not a ruthless, unfeeling assassin or a hard boiled detective, she is a woman who is a complete character with doubts, inconsistencies, fears and passions. That all of this characterisation is achieved via Holly Hunter’s wordless performance is one of the film’s many achievements.

Considering the cruelty that Ada suffers at the hands of this story’s Bluebeard, played with a particular feckless menace by Sam Neill, a modern audience might expect some kind of retribution to provide a sense of catharsis and allay any lingering anxieties. In fact, Campion provides no justice for Ada’s husband, to do so would be a dishonest representation of the patriarchal system that functions as the basis of The Piano’s historical context. Campion presents Ada’s act of defiance not in her taking any literal revenge against her husband, but in a continuous refusal to conform to the mold of a tragic heroine.

Despite the difficult circumstances, Ada is anything but a victim. Right up to the film’s third act, she never allows the masculine forces that seek to control her to triumph. Even Ada’s silence, which is something that does not initially seem to bother her new husband (likely because he assumes it will connotate to submissiveness) is itself a form of protest. In a time and place where female voices are not listened to, Ada’s total silence embodies her resolute non-compliance and refusal to adhere to the expectations put upon her.

Another question raised when revisiting The Piano, is how the dynamics between Ada and Baines (Harvey Keitel) would be received today. Considering their relationship begins with Baines trading Ada her piano key by key in exchange for increasingly intimate favours, I can’t help but think this element of the film would be hastily dismissed as problematic. In light of how a recent film like Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2018) was interpreted by some as “not the right film” for our current climate due to the provocative and challenging relationship at the centre, I imagine people would have a lot to say about a film where a vulnerable woman marries her blackmailer. Yet, Campion’s boldness in examining the complexities of Ada’s relationships is what makes The Piano so fascinating.

Ada’s relationship to Baines bristles with an initial discomforting energy that slowly gives way to something strangely, yet authentically erotic.Too many contemporary filmmakers shy away from depth in favour of pandering to an easily pacified audience, but The Piano never tries to navigate an easy passage though its more complicated themes.

Campion has shifted her focus towards television of late. Her series Top Of The Lake touches on many of the ideas recurrent in The Piano and has been widely praised. Yet, despite the attention that is heaped onto “prestige TV”, I can’t help but feel dismayed that Campion no longer sees cinema as the right medium for her. Her incredible sensitivity and nuanced approach to difficult issues are sadly absent from the big screen.

The Piano‘s 25 anniversary special edition is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 15th.

A Ciambra

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

Premiering at Cannes 2017’s Director’s Fortnight, A Ciambra screened at the Festival to a largely positive reception. However, outside the special bubbles created by such an environment, for better or worse, a festival favourite becomes malleable to the real world away from the confides of sponsored Illy cups of coffee.

Further, with an executive producing credit, Jonas Carpignano’s latest feature possess an extra selling point: Martin Scorsese is one of the film’s executive producers, alongside Emma Tillinger Koskoff. Adopting a milieu in the mould of Italian Neorealism, A Ciambra works as a piece in the mould of the cinematic past, whilst projecting its contemporary context to the forefront of its visuals.

Pio (Pia Amato) knows nothing else outside of a life away from hustling cars with his brother, smoking and voyeuristically observing men of crime in rural Calabria, Italy. Caught somewhere between boyhood and manhood, he is too old to be fooling around with younger kids but has yet to prove his masculinity to the older men in the criminal underworld. At home, he comes from a line of Roma people that are known to the Carabinieri to be criminally engaged with car theft and extortion. In his unique approach, Carpignano gained the trust of Italian-Roma travellers, who are consequently cast throughout the film. Again recalling Neorealism, this technique works well in the introduction of the Pio’s actual family but halters past this point.

Stories such as this have been expressed before in cinema’s history but Carpignano’s acceptance and head on confrontation of the European migration crisis from the East bestows the film with fresh light, represented in the boy’s friendship with a working migrant, Ayiva (Koudous Seihond).

Shooting across the remote and desolate locations of Calabria, the cinematography here could juxtapose the innocence of the boy with blushing pastoral beauty. Yet, what is deployed through Tim Curtain’s camera is a tight focus of Pio himself. There are no sweeping longshots, whatever the boy observes the audience likewise does. Recalling the haunting work of László Nemes and his DP Mátyás Erdély in Son of Saul (2015), the work submerges one’s spectatorship into the world present. Meandering through the space, the distinct lack of profundity towards Pio’s true existence, as so fundamental to the mastery exhibited in Neorealism, means that this cinematic technique serves to isolate and become repetitive.

This is not a lacklustre film. There is a vitality in witnessing this boy go through the motions of getting sucked into the criminal underworld, yet the whole affair lacks true perspicacity. One has to complete Carpignano on incorporating the migrant crisis deep into his narrative, still this only serves as a buffer to the main narrative. This unfortunately results in one of the most on-the-nose endings I can recall in recent memory. Souring the taste after its tedious almost two hour running time, it was enough to produce a lousy gasp on my behalf.

A Ciambra is out in cinemas across the UK of Friday, June 15th. It’s out on VoD on Monday, October 15th.

Studio 54

Posted on by victorfraga

For a brief moment in time, Studio 54, an exclusive New York nightclub with a highly selective entrance policy and a somewhat less discerning attitude towards sex and drugs, was the place to be. Founders Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell renovated the out of use theatrical space in the middle of a crime-ridden area of Midtown Manhattan and transformed it into a hotbed of hedonism, celebrity and somewhat less glamorously-massive scale tax evasion. Director Matt Tyrnauer’s descriptively titled documentary Studio 54 lasers in on this idea of lawlessness, capturing the way that the club sealed itself from the outside world, disregarding any law that might inhibit the good times.

The film is at it most interesting when it examines how this isolationist attitude strove for something greater than selfish pleasure-seeking. One of the film’s many talking heads explains how the rise of disco culture gave birth to a scene where people of all races, genders and sexual persuasions partied together. Two drag queens interviewed within the club’s hallowed grounds explain how safe and at home they feel within the confines of the club. A painfully earnest, pimply Michael Jackson appears in one memorable bit of archival footage to express how much he loves the club’s judgement free attitude. The idea of nightclubs as a “safe space” for marginalised and vulnerable groups is a thought-provoking one. The club’s authentic counter-culture credentials certainly gave it some cache as a kind of protest ground that flew in the face of the prejudiced society that was determined to break its doors down.

But break its doors down they did, giving way the “fall” section of the Studio’s meteoric rise and fall narrative. Tyrnauer’s subjects, who include Schrager among them, are upfront about the realities of the club’s demise. They all seem to understand that it was a bubble bound to burst. The basement was an evidence room of dodgy cash and poorly concealed drugs and Rubell’s insistence that the club’s exclusivity made them somehow untouchable from the outside world made the arrest of the owners an inevitability.

What follows is a distinctly less glamorous portion of the film that comes to encompass the dawn of yuppie culture, the Reagan administration and the Aids epidemic. Studio 54 quickly goes from being an entertaining examination of a particular era of glamour and decadence to a tragic loss of innocence story.

Tyrnauer always keeps his focus squarely on the Studio and its affiliates, but in doing so he captures how even something as seemingly inconsequential as a nightclub can come to reflect, and fall victim to, the uncaring sweep of history.

Studio 54 is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 15th. It’s available on VoD from Friday, August 10th.

Our lowdown on Sheffield Doc/Fest

Posted on by victorfraga

Sheffield Doc/Fest provides a real treat for those interested in innovative non-fiction cinema, and this year’s 25th edition proved no different, to the joy of 30,000 odd attendees. The most remarkable element of the Festival is how well programmed it is. Each screen seems to host a certain type of film. For example, The Showroom screen 4 hosts much of the high profile work, while foreign oddities permeate the Light Cinema 8. This becomes an easy way to sense what you’re getting yourself in for, and festival goers could easily sit in one screen all day without losing patience.

Between his jury presence, talks, and the UK premiere of his latest film, there’s more Mark Cousins than you can shake a selfie stick at (hyperbolic poet that he is, he’d probably describe a selfie stick as the quill for the modern age). His The Eyes of Orson Welles (pictured at the top of this article) premiered in The Odeon, which carves a space for itself as an area for more cult documentaries about cinema itself, such as The Insufferable Groo, an awkwardly funny film about useless filmmaker Stephen Groo’s attempts to cast Jack Black.

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Dangerous film liaisons

I found strange connections on my Saturday night between The Eyes of Orson Welles and Mexican high school drama Antigone (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio) through to Shirkers (pictured above). Each film seemed to inform the next one. The addition of a live musical performance to evening screenings, like Gaika with Black Mother (Kalik Allah; pictured below), Weish’s electronic gig following Shirkers, or Linn da Quebrada’s incredible performance following Tranny Fag (Kiko Goifman; pictured at the bottom), gives these events a headline feel, and raise your energy after 12 hours of back to back screenings.

Mention has to go to Sheffield’s paperless ticket system, which is the most efficient I’ve come across at a UK festival. You book the tickets online, they go straight onto your pass, which gets you straight into the screen. If you’re not there five minutes before the movie starts, you ticket gets given to those in the standby queue. This gets the people in their seats fast and meant a majority of films were playing to a packed crowd.

One such film was Nathanial Dorsky’s latest, the 7 film Arboretum Cycle, which received its international premiere on Sunday afternoon. Projected on 16mm, this is a true indulgence for fans of experimental cinema. Over 2 ½ hours he plays with light and colour in the forests of California after a long drought. It’s like dropping acid, or drifting in and out of sleep, or any of the other cliches. Programming Arboretum at this point in the festival is a stroke of genius for those who need to leave themselves at the door for a little while.

While this is an incredible event for dedicated cinephiles, one wonders about their outreach efforts. Aside from an outside screen playing short docs, there are few free events. Locals who I spoke with complained that the event hadn’t been advertised enough within the city itself, which they saw as an elitist attempt to retain a certain type of visitor. Others mentioned being priced out of the festival entirely. I must confess I barely heard an accent from further north than Birmingham, though this is an internationally diverse event and certainly one geared towards an insular industry.

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Young and keen

The youth jury programme is an excellent initiative created in order to to encourage young people to attend, their selection is full of work that will interest creative young people. There is indeed an abundance of young cinephiles stalking the halls of the Showroom. They are giving a leg up to people at the start of their careers, putting them in the same space as the biggest people in the industry. Doc/Fest is an essential, generous festival full of empathy and friendly faces. The film selection offers something for people of every background, you just need to know to search for it.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Posted on by victorfraga

Winning the Special Jury Prize at Sundance this year, Hale County This Morning, This Evening has been the talk of Sheffield. Having finally caught up with it, this feels like the emergence of a major new cinematic voice in the form of director RaMell Ross. It’s an elliptical piece of reportage from impoverished Hale County, Alabama which, shot over half a decade as Ross lived and worked in the area as a gym instructor, takes the viewer on a walking tour of the place and its people. Although there is no narrative in the strictest sense, Ross’ tight and relentless technique makes Hale County a borderline masterpiece of documentary storytelling.

Strikingly, Ross uses the frame to hide elements – a balloon covering someone’s face, or a person off-screen driving a conversation while the camera focuses on a vacant onlooker. The separation of the senses widens our perception of things beyond the frame, and allows Ross to link scenes using their texture. Fog billowing behind a police car becomes dry ice in a club, which cuts to the flickering blue light of a playstation in a smokey lounge. It’s a film that softly explores the majesties of the everyday: screaming for the sake of it, the texture of objects and setting, and then carefully selects its image sequencing. The sound of a school playground sits over a vast tracking shot of desolate fields, drawing the people together with the landscape.

Hale County engages directly with the personality of its subjects. Not by highlighting any grotesque physical qualities, but by introducing everyone on a beat of action to zone in on their place in the world. It doesn’t trim any fat away, to the extent that some of it almost feels like found footage from social media. The face of a toddler staring at her father while he orders McDonald’s is one such moment, but sequenced near the end of the film it becomes one of the most strangely compelling images of the entire festival. The point-of-view is so strong that it almost feels first person. Ross only addresses us directly through brief intertitles “Carrying twins now, Boosie careth not about the film.” but you can feel his physical presence behind the camera. Each new space welcomes you in. There’s no time to adjust, you’re there, a part of the scene – whether it’s a football team in a locker room or moments of quiet domesticity.

Like in Black Mother (Khalik Allah, 2018), you see a freshly born baby. But instead of using it as a spiritual, elevating moment, this scene is more grounded in the emotions displayed on the mother’s face, the clinicism of the delivery room. Hale County is not poverty porn. No facts and figures or didactic attempts to provoke change bog the film down. The audience is trusted to go with the film’s argument, to pick up on the situational context. A young man celebrating at a basketball game match cuts to his scared face as chilling shot of a policeman reflected in a wing mirror tells you all you need to know about his situation. Subtle political moments like this, or an insert shot of a minstrel that cuts to a shot of a man’s shadow playing catch, allow Ross to make his film part of a wider conversation about race in America without repeating over-familiar arguments. Instead, his focus is on the specific experiences of the people: a gambit that allows Hale County to operate within several spaces at once. This is very dirty indeed: challenging but rewarding, expertly edited and shot with a dynamic, light touch. Hale County is a potent work that all lovers of cinema need to seek out.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening showed at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in June 2018, when this piece was originally written. It is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 18th.

Black Mother

Posted on by victorfraga

Experience a stunning assemblage of photography that does for Jamaica what Terrence Malick did for 1950s’ suburbia in Tree of Life (2011). It’s a poetic travelogue of the Caribbean nation from street photographer and director Khalik Allah, who guides his audience through a trip which takes turns spiritual, political, and finds a meditative middle ground that will satisfy any willing audience member.

In trying to explore the passage of time, innocent girls growing into women as sexual objects into mothers into grandmothers representing history and legacy, there’s a somewhat problematic objectification of women before the lens. It’s built in to the film’s swooning representation of Jamaican cycles of life, and there is a real tenderness to the way Allah shoots women’s hands and arms, wrinkled, sun beaten, dancing. But he doesn’t look at men in the same way. Old Rastafarians are seen through his camera with lecherous toothless grins, men coax women into cars or loiter on the street.

The director utilises different film stocks contingent on mood rather than any traditional narrative. Here the bold use of digital wakes you from your trance, or sends you into another rabbit hole. He touches on Jamaica’s class struggle, Christianity, weed. The spectre of colonialism is present but never preached. Allah’s brilliance as a director is in his ability to draw the audience along the same subliminal path to ideas. It’s this, and possibly the gorgeous use of slow motion, that convinced Beyonce to tap him for doing the photography of her visual album Lemonade.

There’s an impressive audacity to Allah’s leaps in logic. By the final section, which links birth and death by juxtaposing a funeral with a live on screen birth, he’s risking completely alienating his audience either through his abject visuals or the sheer obviousness of the ideas. But he shoots with such verve, capturing the very essence of what makes these rituals so important in just a few frames. It’s stunning, and I can’t wait to watch it again.

The screening featured a live score by Warp records signee Gaika, whose wails and warbles put Kid Cudi to shame, and who punctuates moments with parodic producer tags “Warning! Jesus will NOT save you.” His hypnotic score, which incorporates hard dub elements and splashes of 808s alongside a more traditional electronic symphony, brings out the prominent culture clash theme within Allah’s film. It’s hard to say how much this changes the entire vibe of the film, but if Gaika comes to a town near you with his score for Black Mother you need to make time for it.

Black Mother showed at the Sheffield Doc Fest in June, when this piece was originally written. It’ out in cinemas on Friday, November 2nd.

The TOP 5 most thought-provoking Star Wars films!

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s beginning to feel that Star Wars has become its own cinematic universe, rather than just a franchise. With the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story (pictured above), we’ve now seen the second of many proposed spin-offs, in addition to what will soon be nine core films. And while there are now countless rankings littered around the internet of which of these films are best or most enjoyable, we don’t talk as often about which ones gives us the most to think about. So that’s what we’ll focus on here.

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1. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard, 2018):

The public is still digesting this newest Star Wars film, but it seems that with specific regard to the franchise it will ultimately be among the most thought-provoking. That’s because this is the film, more than any other before it, that forces us to confront the somewhat sudden reality noted above: that Star Wars is now its own cinematic universe. One of the more interesting responses to Solo’s release came from The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey, and posed the question of what happens when a Star Wars story isn’t special or when, as the story also mentioned, such a story lacks a “wow factor.” The point here is not that Solo is a bad film, but that it feels more ordinary or run-of-the-mill in the context of a world in which we suddenly get a new Star Wars movie every year.

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2. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017):

The Last Jedi was polarizing, and by this writer’s estimation, disappointing. However, it was also particularly intriguing simply by way of introducing more new things to the universe than any other entry since The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999). We saw a Jedi stronghold/training island for the first time, for instance, in something of a loose homage to Luke and Yoda’s time together in The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). We saw a space casino, in a possible throwback to the iconic cantina scene that also felt vaguely like pandering to young audiences. A wealth of one-of-a-kind games has rapidly grown the online casino gaming business, to the point that more young people are familiar with these types of games, and might have related to the playfulness of a space casino. We saw new creatures, new types of Imperial Walkers, a new Sith lair, Imperial Guards that actually did something, etc. Basically, in everything from setting to characters, The Last Jedi just established a new look.

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3. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016):

Not to harp too much on the newest of the Star Wars films, but there’s an argument to be made that Rogue One is actually the biggest outlier of them all, in terms of feeling like a one-off project. While not without flaws, it earned sweeping critical praise essentially for being a terrific war movie, with more than a few reviews comparing it to Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998). That might be a little bit of a stretch, but it does speak to the idea that Rogue One, more than any other film in this rapidly expanding franchise, taught us to question what a Star Wars film could be. It was the first such film made without a Skywalker, and while it directly concerned the events of A New Hope (George Lucas, 1997), it felt very much like a successful telling of a tale that simply happened to exist in the same universe. It opened the door for potentially limitless types of films for the franchise to explore.

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2. Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (George Lucas, 2005):

Revenge Of The Sith might be the most thought-provoking film of them all strictly from a character standpoint. Say what you might about the prequel trilogy, but despite insistent reliance on silly creatures, cheesy visuals, and questionable acting performances, this trilogy accomplished its core goal: to depict the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker. Most who care about or even study the Star Wars saga agree that Anakin is in fact its core character, and Revenge Of The Sith is the film that really shows how he transitioned from promising Jedi to devastating Sith apprentice. It’s a film with some interesting messages about loyalty and influence somewhat cloaked in over-the-top (and actually fairly spectacular) action sequences.

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5. Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977):

If Revenge Of The Sith had the most going for it from a character perspective, A New Hope was probably the most significant in terms of pure filmmaking. Naturally it’s the film that started this whole, improbable ride, and it changed cinematic science fiction for all of time. As one ranking of the films put it, A New Hope showcased an exhilarating mix of old movie tropes and newfangled technology. It also combined an almost Old West style of drama and action with the unusual, unique zen of the Force. It was simply an original effort, and one that we can still look back on and be fascinated by when we think of how it set the tone for so much that was to come.