Category: ARTS (2022)

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of Apple TV

This extraordinary new film from Martin Scorsese is a monumental study of the atrocities inflicted on the Osage Nation of Oklahoma throughout the 1920s. It shines a spotlight on a people consigned to the fringes of history who realised their land was built on vast reserves of oil, briefly making them the wealthiest people per capita on the planet and who were slaughtered for their wealth.

Scorsese’s film is based on fact and is adapted by him and Eric Roth from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name. Its opening depicts the discovery of the oil, a kind of miracle. A rumbling in the earth precedes frenzied dancing beneath black rain, captured in striking slow-motion.

From here, we go into a history of the Osage people rendered in the style of a black-and-white newsreel before colour begins to seep into the fringes of the picture. This remarkable opening makes it clear that at 80 years-old, Scorsese has lost none of the fleet-footed playfulness which has defined his previous pictures, but he combines it in Killers of the Flower Moon with a confrontational anguish which pushes the film into the realm of greatness. This is a landmark film, as horrifying as it is vital. Essential cinema.

Leonardo Di Caprio plays Ernest Bruckhart, who has returned from the First World War to stay with his uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert De Niro), who also houses Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). Hale poses as a friend of the Osage – and even speaks the language – but secretly plans to murder them so that he can claim their headrights, which entitle the owner to a quarterly share of the Osage Mineral Estate.

As part of Hale’s scheme, Ernest is encouraged to court Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) whose family own a large share of the headrights. Hale has engineered a sequence of deaths which will leave Ernest as the sole inheritor of the Kyle fortune upon Mollie’s death.

That this description still manages to do the nuances and subtleties of the plot a disservice speaks to the awful complexity of the real-life crimes Scorsese excavates here. This is a very long film, but it exerts a vice like intensity over its audience and unfurls via a series of increasingly horrific acts of violence, treated with unsettlingly straightforward bluntness.

Indeed, audiences expecting the stylised thrills of Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street will be sorely disappointed by Killers of the Flower Moon, a picture in which Scorsese is operating on the quieter and more contemplative levels of Silence or The Irishman. The violence here is accompanied not by wisecracks or needle-drops, but by the oppressive silence of injustice.

Not that Killers isn’t astonishingly engaging for almost the entirety its 206-minute runtime, but that it seems Scorsese himself is using it to reflect on the ways he has shown violence in his films, and perhaps the ways they have wound up inadvertently glamorising violence and criminal lifestyles.

Luckily for Scorsese, he has the perfect character to critique these ideas in Ernest, who even by the standards set by the director’s previous works occupies a particularly low rung on the ladder of human decency.

Ernest is a white man, a drunkard and sleaze who by his own admission loves cold, hard cash and has no scruples about how it’s obtained. He acts almost as an inverse of The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, who knew what he was doing and made no apologies for gaming a system. Here, the system is playing Ernest: while he’s making a fortune, he’s too much of a neanderthal to realise just how ensnared in evil he really is. He’s neither a hero nor a villain. Instead, he is perfectly and stupidly ignorant. It makes him revolting.

At the apex of its intensity Killers ultimately captures a kind of fever-pitch hysteria which will feel bracingly unfamiliar to its many of its white audience members (when was the last time this critic was afraid to leave the house?), and it hurtles along with relentless ferocity. Yet what causes the film to transcend its genre trappings is its vivid depiction of Osage culture and the dignity it affords each of Nation’s people.

Scorsese holds the Osage at a respectful degree of narrative and aesthetic distance, aware that he is fundamentally an outsider to these people. And while Molly gradually comes to signify genuine good tarnished by white greed Scorsese never attempts to depict her psychological interior, aware that to do so would reduce her to yet another commodity. Gladstone’s performance is a miracle in itself: her reservedness, her poise. Her very presence is a force of nature, a reckoning in itself.

Perhaps the film falters in focusing so heavily on Ernest and the conspiracy to obtain the headrights. Some critics may argue that Scorsese is repacking Osage trauma for mass-consumption by mainstream cinemagoers.

But Di Caprio plays Ernest with such a simpering cowardice, and De Niro plays William with such bull-headed greediness that it’s never unclear who the villains are here: they ultimately come to embody the racist capitalism the film so harrowingly condemns. The film’s politics are never up for debate.

There is a roughness to the film, a kind of holed-ness at its centre. Its most radical aspect is that it feels intentionally unfinished to suggest that so long as the Osage are denied justice, the story the film tells is still ongoing.

And with a final, gloriously self-aware flourish Scorsese turns the microscope on both the film and himself, deftly critiquing the ways that the suffering of real people is too often softened by the comfortable distance time – and the cinema screen – can afford us.

He is guilty. And so am I. And so are you.

Killers of the Flower Moon – official trailer

Killers of the Flower Moon is in UK cinemas now, for more information and UK screenings visit: www.killersoftheflowermoonmovie.co.uk

For screenings from Birmingham’s independent cinemas visit:

The Electric at www.electricbirmingham.com/whats-on
Midlands Arts Centre at www.macbirmingham.co.uk/event/killers-of-the-flower-moon
The Mockingbird Cinema at www.mockingbirdcinema.com/production/killers-of-the-flower-moon

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of Universal Pictures UK

“Life is like a henhouse ladder,” opines Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), “shitty and short.”

It’s one of many sharply clever – and quotable – moments in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, a gentle and warm-hearted tale of a group of very different people forced together by circumstance. It’s a long film, but it’s told with such depth of feeling that every minute of its runtime feels totally warranted, so when it ends you feel sad to be pulled out of the cozy, nostalgia-tinged world it conjures.

Even its plot, set in 1970’s New England on the grounds of the fictional Barton Academy, recalls classic American campus novels like John Williams’ Stoner or Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Take the ‘holdovers’ of the title, these are the people with nowhere to go when the school shutters for Christmas and are left glumly stuck on campus.

Giamatti’s grouchy Paul Hunham teaches ancient history and is widely disliked, while canteen head Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) can’t bring herself to return home after the death of her son in Vietnam. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is fiercely intelligent but has a wish to self-destruct; his mum and stepdad have ditched him to honeymoon.

The Holdovers recalls a simpler and less pretentious era of independent filmmaking, even down to the vintage logos and age-rating which precede it. While these would feel like gimmicks in the hands of others, Payne is able to follow it through with his direction. Indeed, there’s something legitimately nostalgic about Payne’s filmmaking in that it appears to be a relic from the very time it depicts.

Besides the vintage logos, Eigil Bryld’s splendid cinematography has a grainy, dusty sheen which evokes the wear and tear physical film accrues. Notice, too, the gentle cross-fades, low-key delivery, and montages set to the music of the era: all wonderfully atmospheric touches that deepen and enrich the film’s setting and characters.

The performances are lovely. Giamatti savours the role of a cantankerous old grouch, but when he lectures on the Peloponnesian War he springs to life, unable to comprehend why his bored-senseless pupils fail to see the profundity of what he teaches. “To understand the present, we have to look towards the past,” he says, but Giamatti’s posture and stare suggest someone refusing to reckon with the unpleasantness of the man he’s turned into. It’s only now he’s beginning to question what his life has really been worth.

This is surely the performance of Giamatti’s career, and his scenes with Sessa’s scrappy Angus Tully are amongst the film’s highlights: “I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same way about me,” Hunham tells Angus.

Randolph is exquisite as the underappreciated canteen head Mary, in a role which has all but locked her in for a Best Supporting Actress nomination next year. She does so much with stillness here: she a woman uncared for by most, but who still seeks good in everyone.

In one scene she delicately unpacks her dead son’s baby clothes. In the hands of Randolph, the simple act of placing a pair of pristine, tiny shoes in a drawer becomes an act of real emotional heft.

Giamatti and Sessa steal the show with gusto and their performances are big-hearted and brash but make no mistake, this is Randolph’s film. She is the softly spoken miracle at the heart of this wonderful ode to difference and circumstance.

The Holdovers – official trailer

The Holdovers is set for release in UK cinemas on 19 January 2024. For more on The Holdovers visit: www.universalpictures.co.uk/micro/holdovers

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

Jodie Comer has a face of steely determination in this in this sensitively acted film from Mahalia Belo, directing her first feature length picture. It’s a tale of a new mother (Jodie Comer) escaping from cataclysmic flooding, trying to forge a future for herself and newborn son.

But it’s hindered by uneven pacing, and as it travels further and further away from civilization the tension all but evaporates and the narrative becomes oddly slack. A shame, The End We Start From feels like a far more disappointing film than it should be.

Belo’s film follows a nameless woman, first seen nude in the bath and watching her bump shift as the child within kicks. It’s a striking image, expressing a kind of quiet purity so lacking from much of the current cinema, but it’s one tinged with irony. A few moments later – rocked by contractions and getting understandably a tad panicked – the woman looks in horror as floodwater begins to seep in under the back door, and before long she’s wading through filth to get to an ambulance.

From here things only get worse; Britain is being rocked by extreme flooding, and what Belo’s film – adapted by Alice Birch from the novel by Megan Hunter – captures so well is how quickly things would go to absolute shit. The internet is down, so the NHS is forced to start keeping manual birth-registers, and the woman and her partner (Joel Fry) are forced to name their newborn son Zeb immediately else he’ll be legally registered as nameless.

Britain quickly becomes a network of what are effectively smaller islands, with villages on higher land refusing entry to non-locals. Fortunately, the woman and man can shelter with his parents (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya) but when disaster strikes, they are forced to leave this idyll and descend into the real world.

The End We Start From will inevitably draw comparisons to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men with its depiction of new motherhood in the face of societal collapse. But where Children of Men had a grimly sardonic edge with relentlessly intense action set-pieces, The End We Start From presents a far quieter slide into the end times: no car-chases or explosions, just desperate people slowly turning on each other.

Where the film’s feminism comes to the fore is when emergency shelters begin only allowing women and children, and the woman and her husband are forced to separate. It’s here she meets another new mum, played with droll warmth by Kathryn Waterston, who has a friend staying in a colony for the wealthy off the coast of the Scottish Highlands.

It’s here that the pace begins to meander though, and watching Comer and Waterston trudge across various fields with their babies lacks the momentum and stress of the film’s first half. And it heads towards an ending which feels rushed and contrived, a feeling exacerbated by the film’s short runtime.

It’s very rare for me to say this, but I’d have gladly taken another twenty minutes (let’s face it, Comer is so good that watching her butter toast would be gripping) if it meant Birch could tighten up the script’s pacing.

The End We Start From is a refreshingly feminist spin on genre typically dominated by male chauvinism, and it further affirms Comer as one of our greatest talents. Lovely too to see such a strong supporting cast of wonderful British actors, including the always-brilliant Gina McKee as the head of the island colony.

But make no mistake, this is Comer’s film: her face has the toughness of granite. It’s frustrating that she isn’t better served by the script, and as the film heads towards a weepy and laboured ending you can’t help but feel that The End We Start From is a bit of a damp squib.

The End We Start From – official trailer

The End We Start From will be released in UK cinemas on 19 January 2024. For more on The End We Start From visit www.mubi.com/en/gb/films/the-end-we-start-from

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of MUBI

The word incendiary feels too slight in describing the forceful power of Molly Manning Walker’s ludicrously good debut feature, How to Have Sex, which unfurls with dreadful inevitability but has the pointed urgency of a Molotov cocktail hurtling towards its target.

What makes the film feel so vital is not only the precision of its craft, but in the fact it feels so perfectly fine-tuned to the moral slipperiness of our current moment.

Manning Walker’s film follows three girls on a boozy holiday in Malia, ostensibly there to celebrate finishing their GCSEs (and anxiously await their results) but really looking to get drunk and have sex.

At the middle of this vortex of partying is Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who is frequently captured in intense close-ups which register whole canvases of emotion and feeling.

For Tara the quest for sex is more important than anything else; she’s still a virgin, and even though that isn’t that important in itself, everyone around Tara acts like it is. When a sleazy rep refers to Tara as a “little flower” you suddenly realise how vulnerable the countless girls who go on these sorts of holidays really are.

But in another, bleaker, way Tara’s friends are correct. They inhabit a sex-obsessed culture and what Manning Walker’s snappy screenplay, drenched in colloquial flavour, captures so painfully are the ways in which these trivial issues can feel so unbearably high-stakes, and the cruel way our society has decided the threshold to adulthood is crossed by having sex.

Intensifying this dread is the fact that Manning Walker’s film often has the feeling of being witness to some natural disaster. The revellers are first heard over a black screen as the opening credits roll: it’s like hearing an earthquake thundering towards you.

The Malia strip is rendered with overwhelming sleaziness by production designer Luke Moran Morris, slathered in neon, alcopops, and sweat. And the morning after it looks like a battleground, rubble-strewn and smoking.

And at the heart of it are a trio of wonderfully committed performances. Em (Enva Lewis) handles her flourishing sexuality with understated, quiet joy. Skye (Laura Peake) paints a fascinating enigma, simultaneously carefree yet oddly jealous of Tara. Why?

The power of Manning Walker’s screenplay comes from the unknowable, that sometimes the actions of others elude simple explanation and that coming to terms with this is a part of becoming an adult. It’s a shame though that unlike Tara, both Em and Skye feel a tad underdeveloped. Depicting the loudness and horniness of the Malia strip lends the film a sense of first-person intensity, but it comes at the expense of a compelling supporting cast.

But these are small issues with the film and do little to dampen the power and urgency of its message. It is bleak and harrowing and feels like an essential piece of filmmaking not just for cinephiles but for anyone who has ever had – or will ever have – sex.

It seems borne from a genuine desire to depict and dissect our present moment and unfurls with a sense of harrowing inevitability, hurtling towards exactly what was always going to happen. It doesn’t have to be this way though, and so long as artists like Molly Manning Walker continue making films like How to Have Sex, one day it won’t be.

How to Have Sex – official trailer

How to Have Sex is set for release in UK cinemas on 3 November. For more on How to Have Sex visit: www.mubi.com/en/howtohavesex

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit https://macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of Fifth Season

It feels like a bit of a miracle that Eileen even got made in the first place. It’s adapted from the 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the closest thing to a genuine enfant terrible that contemporary literature has and a true radical in her field.

Moshfegh’s interests are in sickness and repulsion and why society makes outcasts of certain people over others. I adore her novels; she writes about what disgusts her, so that reading her work is akin to subjecting yourself to a cold plunge of relentless unsettlement.

So, it’s of no surprise it’s taken this long for anyone to be audacious enough to adapt one of her novels for the screen, and it’s also of no surprise than an artist as exacting as Moshfegh has a screenwriting credit on Eileen with Luke Goebel.

Their adaptation skews closely to the beats of original novel: Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) works as a secretary in a prison for horny, sex-obsessed teenage boys in 1960s Massachusetts, and the monotony of her everyday life is punctuated by violent fantasies of sex and suicide. She appears to be sliding inexorably towards death, when her life is abruptly upended by the arrival of the alluring Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), and while Rebecca is quick to take Eileen under her wing it becomes slowly apparent that she has other plans for this vulnerable, lonely young woman.

Key to conjuring this air of quiet deathliness is Ari Wegner’s cinematography, which gives the impressions of having been shot on grainy 35mm film. The world of Eileen has a pallid, sickly tinge to it. It is almost as if the world itself is retching with revulsion over what it’s turned into and is stained with a grimy nicotine tinge. Oppressive too is Craig Lathrop’s production design, all grubby and run-down. Everything is broken and nothing seems worth fixing.

When Rebecca slinks in (she is first seen in her car, blood red) you can’t blame Eileen for being drawn in. Hathaway turns in a performance that fluctuates between feline poise and hysterical weirdness. She gives Rebecca a silkily, predatory quality and when she’s on-screen the film has a perturbing, subtly frightening atmosphere. But she’s also incredibly strange, a thousand film noir stereotypes refracted into one body which is struggling to hold it all together. She is undoubtedly the film’s great pleasure.

It’s a shame then that the character of Eileen isn’t as well served by the transition to screen. The film captures the strangeness of Moshfegh’s writing, but feels oddly reluctant to plumb the depths of bodily repugnance the novel sinks to – where Eileen is an arse-scratching, finger-sniffing creature who refuses to wash her hands and maintains a spectacular thicket of pubic hair.

This dampening is effective in that it allows the film to better depict Eileen’s metamorphosis into a femme-fatale as she’s easier to root for, but you can’t help but feel that the spirit of the novel has been failed. McKenzie feels miscast: she evokes pity but never disgust, so that it’s confusing as to why she’s the outcast she is. Frustrating too is the decision to treat Eileen’s violent daydreams of suicide and murder as the fodder for cheap jumps, at odds with the slow-burn unravelling of the rest of the film.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Eileen is that maybe Moshfegh’s novels, being as singular as they are, simply aren’t made to withstand the transposition to another medium. The film, while certainly having its own twisted and warped pleasures, feels slight in comparison to the bona fide genius of the novel. It conjures an atmosphere of miserable dread which is disrupted and toyed with by Anne Hathaway’s pitch-perfect performance as Rebecca Saint John, though fumbles in capturing the first-person intensity of the novel.

But worst of all is that McKenzie feels woefully miscast as the lead, so that the first cinematic adaptation of an Ottessa Moshfegh novel winds up being the one thing it really, really shouldn’t be: forgettable.

Eileen – official trailer

Eileen is set for release in UK cinemas on 1 December. For more on Eileen visit www.neonrated.com/films/eileen

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan