Category: Uncategorised

Swede Caroline

Posted on by victorfraga

In gardening-obsessed UK, marrow-harvesting is a highly competitive endeavour. The contestants have the ego the size of a giant pumpkin, and they are determined to defend their hard-earned title. In order to do so, they must prove that they are indeed growers not showers. A not-very-sweet Caroline (played by a sullen Jo Hartley) devotes as much TLC to her enormous vegetables as she does to her to newfound lover Willy (Celyn Jones), who also happens to be her neighbour. Her romantic relations are rooted in controversy: her husband died years earlier by falling into an incinerator (“he was toast”, in one of the many puns that populate this strange little comedy, starting with its very title).

The rest of the plot is just as strange. Caroline and Willy are friends with a conspiracy theorist Paul. He too is a plant enthusiast, partaking in the same veggie growing competition. Caroline was disqualified the previous year because of a hairline fissure (whatever that means), and this year balaclava-clad robbers have kidnapped her marrow (which is more or less the size of a person) from her greenhouse. So she sets out to uncover the unsavoury truth. Abundant twists and loud and graphic violence ensues as both people and the veggies are attacked. A real feast of squelching and crunching sounds (presumably many hapless vegetables were butchered in the foley studio). Wilfully tasteless.

The bonkers violence and aesthetic austerity recall British indie classic Prevenge (2017), an absurdist horror-comedy about a bloodthirsty unborn bab. In fact, the director Alice Lowe plays a minor role here, as the vegetable criminal worlds unfolds before our eyes.

The movie is structured as a documentary, with talking heads testimonials being interspersed with “real” footage. Except everything is fake. The slapstick elements and the intentionally contrived acting remind viewers that this is in reality a comedy. The aesthetics are vaguely reminiscent of television show Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, in which actors impersonate real celebrities and feign a turf war to absurd and mostly hilarious effects.

Swede Caroline tries really hard to be funny, too. It relies on shambolic characters and also on dirty jokes. The entire film is spiced with sexual innuendo (“the largest leak”, “the longest chilli”, “he won an award for putting weight into his pumpkins: no longer allowed anywhere near that fields”, etc). It partly works. The movie elicits some laughter, but its wonky storyline inevitably leads to some less remarkable flavours, and this bigger-than-life story often becomes a little insipid (much like the overgrown marrows portrayed on screen).

Swede Caroline premiered at Raindance in 2023. It is in cinemas on Friday, April 19th (2024). An easily-digestible little movie.

Rouge

Posted on by Paul Risker

In his director’s statement, Hamoody Jaafar says that real people, real places and real stories are the inspiration for his work. His basketball documentary, Rouge is an engaging story about the River Rouge High School Panthers – past and present.

Between 1954-72, the Panthers won a record 12 state championships under their legendary coach Lofton Greene. Now, former Panther player LaMonta Stone, returns to the once thriving industrial town of River Rouge, Michigan, seeking the school’s fifteenth state championship as its head coach. Rouge is as much about the personal journeys of its subjects, among them Seniors Brent Darby Jr. and Ahmoni Weston, and junior Legend Geeter, as it is about basketball and the dreams of its players who look ahead to their collegial future.

Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), about the struggles of two inner-city Chicago high school teenage basketball players with aspirations of playing professional, and Jason Hehir’s The Last Dance (2020), chronicling Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bull’s 1997-1998 season campaign to win a sixth NBA title, are perhaps the two seminal basketball documentaries. Jaafar’s film struggles to escape these long shadows, but as if it were doggedly moving back and forth between offence and defence on the court, it captures something of Hoop Dreams and The Last Dance. There are the struggles the adolescent players must confront as student-athletes, and the pursuit to add to a legacy, that echoes both James and Hehir’s captivating real-life stories.

Jaafar’s directorial debut shows his deft touch at constructing layers of a story. He does this by identifying chapters in the story of the basketball programme, drawing out themes and ideas that contribute to a broader conversation. The first is emphasising the relationship between past and present, and the new generation of players that want to belong to the school’s storied history. It speaks to the natural desire in each of us to belong to something, which provides us with a sense of meaning and purpose. Only for these players, everything has to be earned. They must confront their vulnerabilities and the uncertainty of the future, even the outcome of each game they play on route to hopefully being one of the final two teams playing for a state championship.

The Michigan State Spartans University head basketball coach Tom Izzo offers some of the films most compelling contributions. He speaks about how sport at its best can break down boundaries and acknowledges Lofton Greene’s determined principle of setting aside racial politics in the segregated US to give those deserving the opportunity. Greene would select an all-five starting line-up of black players and would go on the record as saying he didn’t care about the colour of his players’ skin. Shining a light on these progressive actions during segregation and remembering someone that was ahead of their time sets Rouge aside as an important and necessary film.

Memory is a subject that Jaafar weaves throughout the film. Former players gather in the run-down gymnasium and its locker room, reminiscing about the past. The bonds of sweat spilled on the court transcend the years, as the audience witnesses the timeless connection these players share with one another. It calls to mind how the past never fades into obscurity as long as it’s alive in the memory. What Stone and his players, among them Darby Jr., Weston, and Geeter are trying to do is to keep the past alive and create new memories so that the River Rouge legacy endures for future generations.

One of the striking things about Rouge is how Jaafar immerses you in the real-life drama of Stone’s campaign to win the fifteenth state championship. He splices through time, creating music montages, picking out the on-court action and off-court conversations the audience need to see and hear. In the on-court action, one forgets they are watching a documentary and momentarily finds themselves perched on the edge of their seat in front of a live sporting event. Rouge effortlessly captures how the individual journeys intersect one another, emphasising that what’s special about team sports is that aside from the individual accolades, it’s the camaraderie of pursuing a common goal.

Rouge premieres at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It also shows at the Freep Film Festival.

Tomorrow’s Freedom

Posted on by victorfraga

Now aged nearly 65, and held inside an Israeli prison for 22 years, Marwan Barghouthi is the person most likely to become Palestinian president (should the man and the occupied nation release themselves from their captors/colonisers). At least this is what Tomorrow’s Freedom claims. The film investigates roughly three decades in the life of a politician who “cannot be broken”, and whose will for self-determination continues to influence Palestinians everywhere. Comparisons to Mandela are inevitable and indeed explored to exhaustion. In addition to sharing the decades-long prison stint, both men have a calm demeanour and eloquent rhetoric.. The late South African revolutionary leader is featured repeatedly throughout this 97-minute documentary, including his claim that “there can be no freedom without Palestinian freedom” and his advocating for violence as a weapon against brutal oppression.

The story zigzags back and forth in time. It reveals the humble origins of Marwan, his rise to power, and – most significantly – the struggle of his family and partisans in order to release him from prison this century. There are no recent images of our protagonist because Israelis have only allowed him to be interviewed from prison once, nearly 20 years ago. His captors held him in solitary confinement for several years, and continue to inflict all sorts of psychological torture to this date in an attempt to destroy his infrangible will. He is held is a high security prison far from his native West Bank, on Israeli soil (in one of the many breaches of international law which Israel routinely makes). We learn that Marwan became a prominent warrior both in the First and the Second Intifada. He was released from jail under the terms of the Oslo Accords of 1994, which Israel quickly disregarded: in the following three years: the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank doubled (from 200,000 to a staggering 400,000). This led to the Second Intifada, which in turn culminated in Marwan’s permanent arrest.

The most powerful moments of the film are the court hearings, as Israelis insult Marwan (“criminal”, “murderer”), and a judge call him a “terrorist” before the trial even began (thereby exposing the deeply biased and flawed nature of the proceedings). There is also abundant interaction with all members of his family: his wife Fadwa, his sons Qassam, Aarab, Sharaf, and his daughter Ruba. Qassam also received a lengthy prison sentence for his activist work, which ironically gave him the opportunity to spend time with his father (as the two men briefly shared the same facility). Fadwa continues to campaign exhaustively for her husband’s release, however even a prison visit becomes increasingly elusive.

The movie is dotted with pro-Palestinian statements and praise of Marwan by prominent politicians and intellectuals from around the globe, including Marxist feminist Angela David, late archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and even former Potus Jimmy Carter. Former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin also becomes an unlikely interviewee and ally. Some of these testimonials were captured for the film, while others are archive footage, in a documentary that blends many languages and formats. This isn’t a problem per se. The biggest issue is that the story is patchy and incoherent, while the film execution is clumsy: from the abrupt editing to the syrupy instrumental score. The camerawork is very precarious, but this is a common feature of guerrilla journalism, and I couldn’t blame it on the two sister directors, who double down as DoPs. On the other hand, there could have been more work at post-production.

Tomorrow’s Freedom provides some insight into the life and the struggle of a fascinating – and yet little-known – political leader. Ultimately, the documentary feels neither exploitative nor intimate. Just distant and incomplete. Strangely, no date is displayed for the most recent events, while the older developments are almost invariably tagged with a year. The sensation I get is that the film was finished around 2018 and left in the back burner (fridge maybe?) until now because there was limited appetite for Palestinian narratives, and then it was hastily rescued and assembled after October 7th (when the Palestinian topic became prominent again).

Worth a viewing, as long as you remain aware of the filmic limitations. Just sit back and learn a little more about the erased history of Palestinian people.

Tomorrow’s Freedom is in cinemas on Friday, April 26th.

Back to Black

Posted on by victorfraga

It is extremely easy and also extremely hard to make a biopic of Amy Winehouse. Hard because this is such a responsibility: the late singer authored one of the best selling albums in history (the titular Back to Black), and she ranked 26 in VH1’s prestigious 100 Greatest Women in Music list. Easy because Amy’s short career boasts a number of easily recognisable tunes that will get audiences hooked even if the film execution was extremely poor, plus her extremely turbulent lifestyle and morbid media coverage provide just the right ingredients for the perfect sob story. Back to Black elicits tears throughout, even if storytelling isn’t entirely convincing.

Newcomer Maris Abela plays Amy from adolescence until her tragically predictable and precocious death at the age of 27, in 2011. The movie is a love letter to a young woman horribly trapped in a juvenile romance, and also to Camden, the London borough where she started her career, lived, died and to which she dedicated her most important Grammy Award. This is also where she was commonly found intoxicating herself and precariously staggering home on her pumps while harassed by a swarm of scandal-thirsty paparazzi. Her regular joints The Dublin Castle (where she performed some of the first gigs) and The Good Mixer (where she met her coke-addicted hubby Blake Fielder-Civil, played here by Jack O’Connell) are prominently featured throughout the movie. Conspicuous in its absence, however, is Amy’s favourite pub, the Hawley Arms, which nearly burned down during the fire that devastated Camden Market in 2008 (Amy used her Grammy win in order to express her love for the area: “‘This is for Camden, Camden Town ain’t burning down”, a reference that becomes watered down and decontextualised in the film).

Amy was a headstrong, perhaps even obstinate, young woman. She did not follow anyone’s advice and recorded her music at her own accord, and opted to have her father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) as her manager (to the dismay of the more established agents and impresarios). And she became completely obsessed with Blake, a rowdy young man with little stability to offer her. He becomes the source of inspiration for her most famous album (she only recorded two in her brief life, the debut Frank and the iconic Back to Black), as Amy desperately grappled with unrequited love and rejection (“you go back to her and I go back to black” refers to Blake returning to his previous girlfriend Becky). He eventually go back to Amy, presumably lured by the money and fame, but ends up going to prison after becoming involved in a violent altercation. But not before they both could overcome their drug differences (Amy liked marijuana, while Blake preferred cocaine; the song lyrics so “You love blow and I love puff”) by bonding over the far more destructive class-a heroin.

Despite Amy’s self-determined attitude, she was never a feminist, and neither is Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film. Instead, this is a movie about a troubled young woman desperately seeking solace in music, and creating history-defining pieces that would move people of all ages, ages and nationalities. She is frail, she is dysfunctional and she is incoherent. It is impossible not to love and feel sorry for her as she begins her descent and inevitable demise. This predicament is vaguely relatable to the director’s. Fifty-seven-year-old London filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson had to face her own physical vulnerabilities as she struggled with cancer twice, plus she understands what it means to ruffle some feathers with a partner choice: Taylor-Johnson is married to Aaron, an actor 27 years her junior.

Abela does a very good job portraying a woman stuck between fame and juvenile love, and lapsing into drug abuse. She does not look a lot like Winehouse, and is a little less less broken and bawdy. Still, her song renditions are very convincing (even if she is ghost-singed by Amy and presumably others), and her fragile resilience entirely palpable. Marsan paints an affable and avuncular Mitch, who’s terribly proud and protective of his daughter (even is he doesn’t always prioritise her well-being above her career). It feels a little cliched, not least because his parental demeanour is broadly seen is unethical and exploitative. It feels almost like the film wishes to exonerate him. Jack O’Connell is seductive and energetic, however a questionable casting choice. He has the mainstream heartthrob looks, far removed from the Peter Doherty-ish, heroin-chic, fedora-hat-clad real Blake.

The highlight of the film are the songs (Back to Black, Fuck Me Pumps, Valerie and Love is a Losing Game are played almost in their entirety), each one structured as a mini video journeying the most recent events in Amy’s life. Otherwise the story is clumsy and all over the place, much like our rogue heroine. Chronologically structured, Back to Black has huge gaps and fails to provide a coherent account of Amy’s rise and fall. There is very little insight into how Back to Black was recorded, what happened in rehab, how her experiences on St. Lucia helped to pave the way to her death (this is where she replaced heroin with alcohol, which eventually claimed her life), etc. Aesthetically, the movie lacks a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. In other others, it does not possess poetic freedom and narrative inventiveness. It is a movie just too conventional for a woman that refused to play by the rules.

Another problem is the superficial representation of drug abuse. Heroin addiction has devastating consequences. See Christianne F (Uli Edel, 1981) for a realistic portrayal of smack use, with genuinely harrowing cold turkey scene. Taylor-Johnson made the facile decision to make this an easily digestible, feel-good mainstream drama, thereby sanitising a genuinely horrific experience.

Still, bring your hankies: you too will bask in the colourful memories and heart-wrenching warble of this bigger-than-life singer gone too soon!

Back to Black is in cinemas everywhere on Friday, April 12th.

Our dirty questions to Shaun Dozier

Posted on by victorfraga

Shaun Dozier is the filmmaker behind The Problem with the Hero (2023), which showed at the San Francisco IndieFest, the Harlem and at the Naples International Film Festival, amongst other events. Shaun is a New York-based North Carolina native, and a graduate at Atlanta’s SCAD MEA film programme. He has directed films in Peru, Brazil and Mexico.

Dozier’s sophomore feature is the story of two writers. The first, Paul Green (David zum Brunnen), is a Pulitzer Prize winner who enjoys many of the privileges of a white man. The other one is Richard Wright (J. Mardrice Henderson), a black artist desperately trying to get his voice heard in the United States of the 1940s. The pair are developing a stage treatment of Wright’s Native Son, but their backgrounds and contrasting philosophies quickly come to the forefront as they try to piece together a particularly delicate scene. What starts off as a friendly discussion about narrative outcomes quickly spirals into a discussion about what the US is to them.

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Eoghan. Lyng – What was it that drew you to these two central characters? These are two intelligent men with conflicting view points who simultaneously hold immense respect for one another. In today’s polarized climate it was refreshing to portray a civil but passionate debate where both parties were still able to listen to each another.

Shaun Dozier – Green was a former soldier who believed that democracy, steered by the voices of citizens such as himself, would gradually generate the change he wished to see. Wright was a communist at the time, who saw only the entrenched interests of power and wealth gripping the nation until a revolution of the marginalised forced them to let go. For this he saw little hope. These are the viewpoints with which they began their work of turning Wright’s novel into a Broadway play.

Their initial collaboration took place over a few weeks in the summer in Chapel Hill. This was Green’s territory where he was at the height of his command, a venerable White Pulitzer Prize winning professor. Wright comes in as young Black novelist with a smash hit and a sensationally unlikable protagonist. Though the character’s unredeemable nature was the main point of Wright’s book, Green was able to convince Wright to temper his portrayal in the draft of their play which accompanied Wright back to New York.

By March, Wright had steered the play back to his original vision. Our film takes place when Green arrives to witness the ongoing rehearsals. As Green debates the changes, Wright is forced to stand up to the man that has become more than just his collaborator, but a kind of mentor and possibly friend. In Wright’s rebuttals, Green is forced to question his place in the telling and advocacy of African American stories.

EL – The film is set in the 1940s – do you think race relations have progressed to a satisfactory level in the last eighty years?

SD – There has certainly been progress, but we still have a long way to go. I can say I know as much and as little to know I am hardly the one to speak with any authority on race relations.

In terms of our story, I imagine Wright would be satisfied to see the dissolution of the tenements he so railed against, but he might be disappointed that low-income housing projects are still necessary and disproportionally house people of color. He would further be dissatisfied with the makeup of our prisons and the histories of those that live there, of those that were killed before they could even go to trial.

And clearly the fact that our story is still relevant today, yields something to our continually evolving consciousness about race as a nation. We are very much deeply involved in discussions of race. Which stories should be told? Whose perspective? Who has a right to tell that story? Who has the right to revision? Which and whose stories have worth?

EL – Richard Wright says “Let them be offended”: Is that a philosophy artists should apply to their work?

SD – Always. Art is meant to be a reflection of the human experience. Reflections can sometimes give offence. They can also inspire.

Native Son is ugly and mean, offensive. But it inspired countless adaptations and characters similar to Bigger. Possibly more importantly it inspired heated debate which is why we are still talking about it today.

EL – Orson Welles is depicted as roguish, albeit ruthless; a man determined to achieve his vision no matter the cost. Would actors tolerate Welles’s behavior today, like they did in 1941?

SD – I would hope that Orson Welles would have been sensitive enough if he were living today to adapt the most offensive of his behaviors. Perhaps he would have found better ways to inspire his cast and crews.

EL – Do you think the Native Son play might speak differently to audiences experiencing the work for the first time in this post Black Lives Matter milieu?

Native Son has been continuously performed and adapted since it first premiered. Brandon Haynes who played Bigger Thomas in our production had recently wrapped Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023), which was nominated for Best Bicture this year (and won Best Adapted Screenplay), highlights the story of a novelist who is offended by the overuse (and success) of Bigger Thomas-like characters. I believe the conversation has developed over the past 80 years, but it is still immediate and relevant.

EL – How did you come across David Zum Brunnen, and how did you know he was the right person for Paul Green?

SD – David, as the producer and actor of the previous staged version called Native, actually approached me to direct the film after speaking with our cinematographer Steve Milligan. I was fortunate to benefit from the extensive knowledge and understanding brought to our production by David and the Native team.

EL – J. Mardrice Henderson has some of the more insightful lines in the film; did he research the part rigorously?

SD – Josh (J. Mardrice) had also played Wright in the staged version and as such came to our project already thoroughly researched. As the staged version takes place entirely in one hotel room, however, we did discuss further in rehearsals the month before production, revisiting sections from Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, amongst many other sources.

EL – Would you class the film as “historical fiction”, and are there other examples of the genre that inspired your work?

SD – We tried to steer as closely as possible to the truth as we understood it while still producing a dramatically engaging film. Much was added to the film script for the sake of historical accuracy. That said, as in any biographical work, there are certainly elements of fiction.

In an attempt to break out the story from the confines of a single hotel room, I studied Danny Boyles’ Steve Jobs which takes place backstage in real time during the lead up to a stage “performance”. For inspiration on filming cinematic conversations we looked at the likes of Hunger and Frost/Nixon, amongst others.

While never leaving the theater, we knew we needed to transition between past and present as well as attempt to express the arguments of Wright and Green in a more visual way. For this we looked at Dogville, Lonestar, and the French Canadian film Lilies. We use the language of theatre, conjuring the spaces of Green’s Chapel Hill office, Bigger’s jail cell, Wright’s train, and the hotel lobby, all on the stage, transitioning from one space to another as seamlessly as possible, between cuts, or drifting between pools of light.

EL – “Enough people say the same nonsense, that it might as well be the truth,” is another killer line. Is that a commentary on the media, and the reader’s susceptibility to it?

SD – Absolutely, particularly in our age of social media where untruths and misleading opinions are so quickly disseminated and taken as fact. I am also an educator and, as we are exposed to an increasing amount of information online and in the media, I find increasingly the need to teach the skills necessary for fact checking, questioning, and evaluating sources of information.

EL – What is the central message of the film, and do you think there is a lesson that the viewers can learn from the story?

SD – Who has the right to tell a story and what are the obligations in the telling? Also the core of Wright and Green’s disagreement were conflicting fundamental beliefs and assumptions about America and the best way to incite change. My hope is that viewers would recognise the questions asked by these men are still questions we are grappling with today. Given the variety of responses we’ve had, I think it is evident there is no clear answer. It is a conversation.

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Shaun is pictured at the top of this interview.

The First Omen

Posted on by victorfraga

We all have to grapple with a broad selection of inner demons. In this prequel of horror classic The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), our protagonist Margaret (in a very energetic performance by Nell Tiger Free) is hellbent on helping fellow novice Carlita (Nicole Sorace) to purge the literal Antichrist, which is allegedly residing inside her. Margaret is convinced that the hapless young woman has been impregnated by the devil, and is expecting a half-human, half-demon child that will grow up to become the young Damian (of the original movie) and take over the world.

A cryptic death scene featuring Charles Dance in the film opening, devilish iconography and foreboding music make it abundant clear from the outset that this is a traditional horror movie unabashed of the all-familiar tropes. You wouldn’t expect otherwise from a story that precedes the horrifying demonic child world domination tale exquisitely told by Donner nearly half a century ago. This is a deserving prequel that remains mostly loyal to the aesthetics of the original, even if sometimes it overdoes the orgiastic CGI.

The action takes place in Rome during the year of 1971. The impeccable mise-en-scene, the computer antics and the vaguely washed-out colour palette give the impression that the film was indeed made five decades ago. Margaret arrives in an orphanage, presumably coming from the United States (given her accent, even if the film fails to provide any information about her origins). She is welcomed by the woman in charge, a menacing nun called Sister Silva (played by a wrinkly Sonia Braga, an often overlooked Brazilian super actress; pictured below), who works under the purview of the equally foreboding Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy). The environment is tense. The sisters torture the non-conforming girls physically and psychologically, with the existence of a “bad room” being of particular concern to our protagonist.

These developments take place against a backdrop of social unrest, three years after the 1968 Revolts that shook Italy, France and much of Europe. Students were still up in arms on the streets of the Italian capital. Cardinal Lawrence and Sister Silva want to Antichrist to reserve this political phenomenon and bring people back to church (the contradiction of using “evil” in order to restore “good” is briefly acknowledged).

The First Omen boasts countless twists and turns as Margaret seeks to fit in, while also caring for poor little Carlota, and ensuring that her actions do not raise any suspicions amongst her formidable superiors. A mysterious priest called Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), who Margaret shunned at first, helps her to put the puzzles pieces together. Creepy deaths take place, presumably because the Antichrist is around (inside Carlita’s womb). The first one is a repeat of the very first suicide in the 1976 classic, with an extra inflammatory flavour. The number of the beast (“666”) MacGuffin and demonic creatures of various sorts are also an integral part of the story, as in the rest of the franchise (in total, there are six films: the original, three sequels, one remake and now the prequel). In addition, first-time director Arkasha Stevenson seems to pay respects to at least two horror classics: one of the final scenes, after Margaret survives a car crash, mirrors Isabelle Adjani’s iconic subway performance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), while a hallucinatory rape scene has Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) written all over it. These tributes are subtle and stylish.

With a duration of 120 minutes, The First Omen is mostly enjoyable to watch, with a few redundant elements hampering the narrative. Margaret befriends the rebellious Luz (Maria Caballero), and the two go out partying, in a subplot that never comes full circle. The movie boasts just too many red herrings. The surprise ending is too ambitious, and also a little awkward. In the final scenes, CGI is favoured at the expense of the performances. This is a satisfactory debut that would have benefitted from a little paring down. Less towering infernos and more facial expressions from hell. Less epic twists and more subtle turns. After all, the devil is in the detail.

The First Omen is in cinemas on Friday, April 5th.

The Top 5 dirtiest cricket movies ever made!

Posted on by victorfraga

Millions of people around the world have been exposed to cricket in a subtle way through movies like Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964), Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), and Frost/Nixon (ron Howard, 2008). It is also a sport that works well as the subject of a movie, whether it’s a mystery or a true story.

So, let’s look at the top 5 best cricket movies ever made (from the lowest to the highest):

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5. Wondrous Oblivion (Paul Morrison, 2003):

The British movie Wondrous Oblivion, which came out in 2003, is about a bond between a young Jewish refugee boy from Europe and the West Indian family who lives next door to his family. The movie takes place in South London in 1960 and deals with race, friendship, and love. The boy (Sam Smith) and his neighbour Dennis (Delroy Lindo) become friends because they both love cricket. The movie won prizes at the Boston Jewish Film Festival in 2004 and the Giffoni Film Festival in 2003. It was directed and written by Paul Morrison.

Wondrous Oblivion is also pictured at the top of this article.

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4. Victory (Ravikumar Chavali, 2008):

In what movie do Allan Border, Dean Jones, Waqar Younis, Simon Jones, Sajid Mahmood, and Brett Lee all have small parts? The answer is Hindi movie Victory, which came out in 2009. The story is about Vijay Shekhawat, who is played by Harman Baweja. He gets to play for the Indian national team, which was his dream, but then he learns about the bad things that come with being famous. Even though it didn’t do well at the Indian box office, you should still watch it, if only to see how well some famous players can act.

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3. Hansie: A True Story (Regardt van den Bergh, 2008):

Hansie came out in 2008 in South Africa. It was about the country’s former captain, who went from being a national hero to a worldwide embarrassment. It’s based on the true story of Hansie Cronje and his amazing fall from fame after he got involved with Indian bookies and the match-fixing scam of 2000. It was directed by Regardt van den Bergh. The movie then shows what happened after Cronje was banned from cricket for life.

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2. Fire in Babylon (Stevan Riley, 2011):

Fire in Babylon is a British documentary about the West Indies team from the 1970s and 1980s. It came out in 2010 and got great reviews. It shows how Caribbean cricket grew as the West Indies became the most dangerous team in the world. It has comments from many past players, such as Michael Holdings, Clive Lloyd, and Sir Vivian Richards. There are three prizes for Fire in Babylon, which is a must-see for anyone interested in the past of the game.

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1. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001):

Bollywood’s 2001 picture Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India is at the top of the list. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture in 2002.Lagaan is still a great cricket movie, even though No Man’s Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001) beat it in that area. In an Indian town under British colonial rule, the story is about poor people who dare their masters to play a game of cricket to get rid of their crushing taxes for three years. Lagaan has also won many awards around the world and has been called one of the best 100 movies ever made.Time magazine put it on their list of the 25 best sports movies of all time.

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Mentions of merit

In the fictional world, cricket is also linked to betting and is used as a plot device, giving the author another chance to build tension and mystery. The dark side of cricket betting, from match-fixing scams to big-money online gaming such as this one, makes for great material for writers who want to explore the topics of corruption, morals, and the bad side of sports.

Examples of novels include David Baldacci’s The Fix and films such as Kai Po Che! (Abhishek Kapoor, 2013) which explore the thrills and dangers of betting on cricket, showing the dark side of the game. While such fictional depictions may sensationalize some aspects of betting on online IPL cricket betting live, they also stand out as a reminder of the real-life challenges cricket authorities have to face in their bid to crack down on match-fixing and corruption.

Other famous mentions include:

  • The Final Test. Jack Warner played Sam Palmer in Anthony Asquith’s 1953 movie about his last game for England. It is a comedy-drama, and famous players like Len Hutton, Denis Compton, and Alec Bedser make cameos.
  • Tamil Nadu 600028. This Bollywood movie from 2007 is about cricket played on the streets in India. It was written and directed by Venkat Prabhu. It looks at many things, like love, competition, and friendship in suburban India. It was nominated for several Vijay Awards, which are given to honor Tamil films.

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All these movies show the spirit of cricket, which is hard work, friendship, and love of the game. They are not only fun to watch, but they can also inspire you.

Alfred Hitchcock gets a dirty film guide!

Posted on by victorfraga

In terms of longevity and influence, Alfred Hitchcock proved to be one of the most enduring directors of his generation, spearheading a narrative style that was homaged by James Bond directors John Glen and Peter Hunt in later years. His status was assured to the point where his name stood comfortably beside Hollywood luminaries Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and James Cagney, becoming a director ubiquitous within the realm of celebrity culture. In his book HITCHOLOGY, film writer Neil Alcock peers at the English director’s body of work, contextualising his artistry both in the era when it was created, and how it speaks to younger generations.

The admiration for the director is evident, although HITCHOLOGY never shies away from the criticisms that are levelled at him. In his closing pages, Alcock outlines a series of lessons that filmmakers can learn from his example, citing an absence of minority cast members and a questionable depiction of women as two factors that should not be homaged. Interestingly, Hitchcock leaned on the guidance of one woman in particular: his wife Alma. A noted film editor, Alma understood the medium of cinema, providing guidance and criticism that helped her husband complete his work. “Her notes were invaluable to him,” Alcock writes; “her approval essential.”

Anxious to become a name, a face and an authority, Hitchcock made the creative decision to put his name before the film title in 1948. (The opening credit for Rope reads ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope’). By the time he completed Psycho (1960), Hitchcock was popular enough to appear in the promotional materials by himself. His face became a recognisable fixture, no doubt helped by his decision to make a cameo appearance in his work. But behind the veneer stood a man who needed to support his family: In an effort to accommodate his wife and children, Hitchcock agreed to direct a musical biography on Johann Strauss II. While some of the observations are spurious (it’s highly unlikely that Hitchcock saw himself in Strauss), Alcock peers behind the public facade – or mask, if you will – to show a worker driven by his desire to complete decent work in a form of entertainment that was still in its relative infancy.

Wittily written – Alcock drily writes that Juno and The Paycock (1930) is as miserable to watch as it was for Hitchcock to complete – the book punches along with impressive economy, and Alcock packs the director’s catalogue into a tidy work that isn’t even 400 pages long. What is apparent is that Hitchcock was a commercial artist at heart, and was happy to accede to trends if it meant getting his work on the big screen. Hitchcock applied 3D to Dial M for Murder (1954), a film that utilises a variety of colourful techniques.”It’s also impossible to ignore the wildly expressionistic scene,” Alcock says, “in which Hitchcock elides an entire court case by using a head- on shot of Margot, as slivers of dialogue, coloured lights and shadows swirl menacingly around her”.

By the time he directed 1954’s Rear Window, Hitchcock was keen to build on character development over narration, culminating in a film that features one of James Stewart’s more refined performances. Rear Window became a favourite of Martin Scorsese’s, another man invested in character building a la Taxi Driver (1976). Rear Window, notably, was filmed entirely at Paramount Studios, which had become something of a habit for Hitchcock after enduring ignominy during the making of The Pleasure Garden (1925). Not only was 10,000 feet of film confiscated by Italian authorities, but Hitchcock’s room was also broken into and burgled. From that point on, he kept his narratives inside a studio, containing his madcap ideas in safe space.

Hitchcock got involved in the scripts, shaping them to fit his vision. Naturally, Alma Hitchcock got involved. “Husband and wife rarely gave themselves screen credit for their writing, but they were both knee-deep in the process,” Alcock notes, although she later demurred from his projects in an effort to focus on her role as a grandparent. Cannily, Alcock hints that had an effect on her husband’s work: “the further towards the end of Hitchcock’s filmography you get, the less believable and sympathetic the female characters become.”

Considering Hitchcock’s penchant for comedy. The fairground scene in Strangers On A Train (1951) ripples with a sexual energy that anticipates the bawdiness of James Bond’s frolics in Octopussy (John Glen, 1983). Alcock wisely litters the book with witty one-liners and frolicsome insights into the Hitchcock universe. He lets his inner critic out at various points – anyone who favours the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is “mad” in his eyes – but the research leads the book, exploring the director’s creative rationale. In an effort to capture the French scenery in To Catch a Thief (1955), Hitchcock opted to film aerial shots from a helicopter; a rarity in the 1950s. In an effort to satiate audience’s expectations of violence and horror in the early 1960s, Hitchcock devised a feature (The Birds, 1963) where animals terrorise humans out in the open air. And when he couldn’t produce a film that interested him on an intellectual level, Hitchcock acquiesced to Universal’s demands to adapt a Cold War Thriller for the big screen: Topaz (1969).

Endlessly inventive, ill health and old age forced Hitchcock to slow down productivity, leading to a four-year-gap between Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976).The latter wound up being his last film, an oddity that has some esoteric charm, particularly in the second half. “On its own terms, Hitchcock’s swan song is a perfectly adequate comic thriller,” Alcock says,”but as far as its legacy is concerned, it’s less ‘crowning finale to an unparalleled career’ than it is ‘tricky pub quiz answer’.” Hitchcock died four years later, at the age of 80.

He left behind a body of work that spanned decades, from the early days of silent cinema, to the kaleidoscopic majesty of his 1950s’ work (to my mind, his most fertile era.) Hitchcock experimented with form, colour and scope, which gives Alcock ample room to ruminate on the director’s canon. That Alcock does it with zest, fervent research and dry wit only furthers his credit.

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Click here in order to find out more about and also to purchase your copy of HITCHOLOGY:a film-by-film guide to the style and themes.

Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time: Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une chute)

Posted on by Paul Risker

This is the alphabetic list of the dirtiest movies ever made, as carefully selected by this humble film critic. I’ve whittled down over a century of films and assigned each one of them to a letter of the English alphabet, beginning with a numeric one.

I’ve always looked at cinema as being like a kid in a sweet shop. There’s an abundance of choice – multiple lifetimes worth. In keeping with this metaphor, this series will include cinema from different decades of film history, and from across the world.

From Sidney Lumet’s 1957 jury room drama 12 Angry Men, we continue our 27-month-long odyssey, jumping forward more than six decades to a suspicious death, of which, the only witness is a blind boy.

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Justine Triet’s crime and courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, co-written by Arthur Harari, is a near-perfect film. From the opening scenes, Triet and Harari have the audience on the proverbial string. The courtroom drama unfolds like an intense duel as the players battle over their convictions. The razor-sharp dialogue, plotting and character development show their deftness for talky dramas. It recalls the writing of some of cinema’s most attuned screenwriters and directors, including Howard Hawkes, Billy Wilder and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Then there’s the obvious comparison to the tension in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), albeit with a modern sensibility.

While only in its infancy, Anatomy of a Fall is already showing itself to be a sassy film. Triet was more than equal to her male co-nominees at the 2024 Academy Awards and should have walked away with the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture.

Anatomy of a Fall is prone to labour under the stuffy and rigid clichés and procedural tropes of the courtroom drama. The filmmakers, however, re-energise it with entertaining, thought-provoking and emotional storytelling. The film exudes a confidence with a Bresson-esque touch. Triet and Harari include only what’s essential, omitting those unnecessary or extended scenes one anticipates. In their hands, every scene has a point and the introduction of specific themes in the courtroom scenes elevate its stature. The relationship between the author and their stories, and how fiction and reality relate to one another, are only two engaging ideas that emerge. The demand from the prosecutor for those giving testimony to describe complicated ideas, thoughts and feelings, to the bias of the therapeutic model, are other intellectual ideas, that creates space for the audience to enter the film and critically engage.

There appears to be a genuine anger towards the legal system, where the fate of a person’s liberty is decided by competing versions of events. The emphasis is on interpretation and how Sandra is perceived by others. Here, the truth can be an inconvenience in the courtroom, that is a stage upon which the characters perform. The prosecution’s case is even accused of offering theories and not explanations. The noticeable misogynistic and patriarchal rhetoric of the prosecutor and his witnesses towards Sandra’s sexuality and professional success fuels the simmering anger beneath the film’s surface.

Triet and Harari’s detailed exploration of human nature, makes Sandra psychologically and emotionally elusive. Complemented by Sandra Hüller’s finely judged performance, she’s one of cinema’s most intriguing and compelling females, not only because of the ambiguity of her guilt or innocence, but who she is.

Anatomy of a Fall is as infuriating as a Lynchian puzzle because it refuses to give its audience any clarity. The point of the film, however, is not to answer that burgeoning question of whether Sandra is innocent or guilty of her husband’s suspicious death. Instead, Triet and Harari want to force the audience to confront this uncertainty and decide, sharing in the young son’s anxiety. This is where Anatomy of a Fall transcends its narrative to be about something more than a question of a woman’s guilt, challenging its audience to overpower their own obsession for clarity. Here, it plays on the first words spoken, when Sandra asks the student interviewing her about her work, “What do you want to know?”

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This is the second one in the series of Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time (one for each letter of the alphabet, plus a numeric film)

The Trouble with Jessica

Posted on by victorfraga

Matt Winn wisely downplays the kitsch in a comedy that opens up as a pseudo-Agatha Christie-esque thriller, before shifting gears to become a biting critique of the British lower-middle classes.

Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk) has invited three friends over before selling their lush, decidedly monied, house. She is suspicious of author and dilettante Jessica (played with voluptuous elegance by Indira Varma), a woman who is known for “sleeping with boyfriends.” Jessica interrupts Richard (Rufus Sewell), a lawyer who has skirted with the law on a number of occasions, with a rape joke of sorts. It appalls the guests who chastise her, although the table is horrified to discover Jessica perched by a tree, a noose over her neck. Sarah is distressed – will this affect the sale of the house? Undeterred, she confronts the dinner guests, and urges them to move the corpse back to another location; preferably, Jessica’s house.

The ensuing mad farce depends very heavily on the relatively unfunny idea of adultery, as it is swiftly revealed that Richard was enjoying a liaison with Jessica before her death, which leads his wife Beth (a weirdly clawing Olivia Williams) to deliver a series of pietistic monologues on what she considers to be the emblems of decent British behaviour. Beth is the most underwritten character of the five – Williams’ only direction seems to be “nagging wife” – but Sarah makes for an interesting lead, flitting from devious to disconsolate over the course of the film. Henderson has a few crassly funny one-liners, not least in her interactions with one particularly nosy neighbour, who is determined to get an autograph from Jessica. Tom reluctantly goes along with the ruse and moves the body from garden to toilet at the appropriate moments.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the film is that Tudyk (a Broadway performer who starred in Spamalot in his younger days) isn’t the funniest male performer in the film. Believe it or not, Sewell, who nominally appears in harder hitting fodder like Scoop (Philip Martin, 2024), is the wackiest, effortlessly chewing the scenery as a snotty-nosed lawyer fearful for his career if this news breaks on the internet. Written with tart-tongued brio, the film zips along at a measured pace, and the zany central premise certainly lives up to the title. Where it falters is in its execution, particularly when the guests decide to move the body across London, on the pretext that their fallen friend is “drunk”. Invariably, the body flops around, leading to a collection of disconcerted gasps among the ensemble, before parking beside a series of drunken teenagers; two of them in mid-coitus. These jokes fall flat, although they never quite descend to the levels of bad taste, and Sewell delivers a riotuous, epiphet driven attack at the couple caught in flagrante delicto (“Could you do your fucking on someone else’s car?”)

Sadly, the film loses its nerve during the final third, as Henderson’s character queries the brevity of life. Considering the nature of the movie, director Matt Winn would be forgiven for including a short dissertation on the aftermath of suicide, but it sits at odd with the film’s anarchic undercurrents. Yet there’s something endearing to the way Sarah and Tom smile at each other, a couple who have made this far into their marriage, and despite the bumps – unemployment, unrest and dead bodies – there is no doubt that their love is true.

This sticky British comedy will probably get an even ropier American makeover in the future, where the grit will almost certainly get replaced by a bawdier, almost vaudevillian, undertone.

The Trouble with Jessica is in cinemas on Friday, April 5th. Just click here for more information.

Urban Jungle

Posted on by victorfraga

In 1991, Nuneaton-born director Ken Loach released Riff-Raff, an urgently directed film that peered at building sites with as much raw honesty as he could muster, and now he returns to the mechanical landscape with Urban Jungle, a film where he reunites with Brian Cox of Hidden Agenda (1990). Cox plays Garry Henderson, a builder who spends his time counting down the hours until retirement, when he spots the loveliest woman he has ever seen in his life. It’s Maryam (Ebla Mari), a Palestinian woman who suggests that they should elope together, to East Jerusalem. This wild possibility tempts him except for the fact that his union buddies will shun him, not forgetting his wife Margaret (Ana de Armas, making her debut in a Ken Loach feature), who has tended to him for 10 years.

Arguably Loach’s most unabashedly romantic feature, the film is also noteworthy for a 10-minute gun fight, which was done in one impressive take. Cox’s Henderson spends much of the shootout covered in sweat, his eyes turning to the love for both the socialist party – which is led by Marina Vazquez, who is played rather wonderfully by Penelope Cruz – and the mistress he longs to run to. This particular silhouette has a political undertone, representing the struggle between the proletariats (the builders) and the capitalists (the architects) through the lexicon of violence.

But it’s not all bullet-fire and pecs: Urban Jungle features one of the most tender romantic scenes Loach has yet filmed, positioning the camera just above Garry and Maryam mid-coitus. They talk about philosophy, discussing the ramifications of the Marxists should they take a more liberal stance towards the conflict in the Middle East. Garry pictures himself in uniform, the sounds of rockets ricocheting across the living room, and he recognises his mediocrity both as a hero and, more fatally, as a lover. Cox hasn’t been this committed in years, and Cruz – the maniacal Vazquez – acquits herself nicely as a sparring partner. Mari has some of the film’s more memorable lines (“Socialism has been here as long as the Bible, but they never put a price tag on it” is a particular hoot). Armas does less well as the clawing Margaret, a Liverpudlian who spends half her time speaking in a Cuban accent (perhaps they’re being knowing, but “Go back to your puta inamorata” is a curious choice of zinger for Armas to utter).

Much of it is statically filmed, but the film opens a variety of rapid cuts that makes Liverpool come alive, as if to disprove the notion that Liverpool is a city based on industry alone. The film chugs along with a rock heavy energy, which might explain why Loach films a band performing a raucous version of Bella Ciao in a café populated by university students. At 140 minutes, the feature will test even the most hardened of Loach disciples, but there’s no denying the chemistry between Cox and Mari onscreen, particularly during the montage in Bani Suheila; a dream sequence that rivals Terry Gilliam at his most daring.
When Garry returns to the building site midway through the film, he does so with a purpose he had never thought possible. In a line thought to be Cox’s own invention, Garry tells Maryam “We really are screwed, so why don’t we just fuck?”

We’ve rarely seen Cox be so animal in cinema, but he has a magnetic twinkle in the eye, making the love scenes more believable. But Cruz is the real scene-stealer as the sloganeering, jeering leader of the workers, all sparkle eyes and gestures. Loach elicits a smooth performance from Cox, and a career-best from Cruz. This production was secretly filmed over the course of just two weeks in Liverpool.

Urban Jungle is in the best cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 5th.