Philip Bagnall

Reviews

FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

The Dead (Blu-ray Review)

At Christmastide, friends gather for dancing, dinner and an evening's entertainment. The party that forms the centrepiece of The Dead is convivial, but not celebratory. Palpable foreboding and regret haunts the dinner table, as guests reminisce on glories past, and worry about what the future has in store. John Huston capped his legendary career with this magnificent swansong. Directing literally from his sickbed, Huston creates one of the greatest final films, one that serves as a poignant acce...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Review

Director Nia DaCosta follows Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later with The Bone Temple, a leaner, smarter, nastier sequel, the best of the franchise since the original.


Both were potent on those terms, but 28 Years Later saw returning director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland try to do too much. It proved more effective at its musings on the inevitability of time and death than when grappling with the aftermaths of Covid-19 and Brexit.


Watching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, it’s clear that d...
HeadStuff •

Hamnet Movie Review | Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s Sublimely Sad Shakespeare Story - HeadStuff

Hamnet opens on Agnes (Jessie Buckley) lying amongst the raised roots of a mighty tree in a forest glade. Enveloped in the greenery and birdsong, the image evokes memories of Millais’ painting of Ophelia drowning after Hamlet has driven her insane. The evocation is apt, as Agnes is more commonly known as Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare. In this image, director Chloé Zhao lays down her intent. This story is something more elemental and deeply felt than the usual biopic. Hamnet isn’...
HeadStuff •

Marty Supreme movie review | Timothée Chalamet's ping-pong epic is a total smash! - HeadStuff

The fallacy at the heart of the American Dream is that working hard and nurturing one’s own talent will guarantee success. Marty Supreme sees poor Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) learn that this isn’t necessarily so. From the opening scenes, it’s readily apparent that Mauser isn’t mousy, his silver tongue helping him sell shoes to punters like ice to an Inuit. He may be able to flog clogs, but his larger dream of sporting glory is gonna take more than a quick turn of phrase to achieve.


After...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

L'Atalante (4K Review)

The legacy of director Jean Vigo (1905 -1934) stretches far beyond his meagre oeuvre. His tragic death from tuberculosis at the age of 29 has always added a layer of sadness to his films, as well as regret that he never got to make more. However, any number of revisits to his only feature film L'Atalante show that the sadness and regret are justified. Like Charles Laughton with The Night of the Hunter, it should have been one of the great debuts at the start of a long career, but it still stands...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Desperate Journey Review: Parisian Hideaways

Though handsome and not without compelling moments, Annabel Jankel’s Desperate Journey tries to do too much within its modest means.


There’s little to Desperate Journey that’s unexpected, right down to its structure. The film opens on a group of Jewish prisoners caught in a bombing raid in Germany in 1945. We meet Freddie Knoller (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), who goes on to recount his story in flashback. Back in 1938 in his native Vienna, he experienced increasing antisemitic hostility as the...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

The Carpenter’s Son Review: Biblical Prequel

Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son finds little new to say about fatherhood or faith, rendering its attempts at solemnity and horror a snore.


Thomas, the best known doubter in history, is attributed as the author of the Infancy Gospel, an apocryphal text that describes paranormal and spiritual events in the life of the pre-teen Jesus. Such texts were intended as private supplements to accepted Scripture, to be used to enlighten and recontextualise the stories of the established texts. Apocryp...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

The Ice Storm (Blu-ray review)

The times, they are a-changin' in The Ice Storm, with the idealists of the early 1960s having moved out of the cities to raise children even more cynical than they were. A new Blu-ray release for this Cannes prizewinner from StudioCanal highlights its emotional potency almost thirty years on. Despite the forecast promised by its title, it revels in its unlikely warmth and hope.
The Ice Storm treads the same ground as the likes of The Graduate and American Beauty, capturing middle-class malaise a...
HeadStuff •

The Running Man movie review | Edgar Wright's flashy remake runs out of puff long before the finish line - HeadStuff

Glen Powell is making all the right moves to become an old-school, bona fide movie star. Even if we’re not making them anymore, he’ll almost certainly be one. An appearance by Tom Cruise, the real running man, at Powell’s latest world premiere feels like an endorsement in that direction. This is in spite of Powell’s choices of scripts, which often involve him obscuring his looks for the plot. Powell is front and centre in The Running Man, which forces his charisma into the faces of his audience....
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

Hilary And Jackie (Blu-ray review)

Indisputable talent. Unintended repression. Profound longing. Heartbreaking tragedy. The relatively brief life of Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) featured all the elements of a two-tissue Sunday afternoon weepie. That's more or less what you get with 1998's Hilary and Jackie, though screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce and director Anand Tucker try to make it stand out from the rest of its boilerplate biopic kin.
Hilary and Jackie charts the main events of du Pré's life from childhood to death, but i...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

Park Avenue (Film Review)

No matter how successful a career an actor has, they often end up focusing on set paths they rarely get to transcend. A lifetime of treading the boards rarely allows for interludes into television or film, and vice versa. Fiona Shaw has enjoyed an illustrious stage career, punctuated time and again by smaller roles in notable films, from My Left Foot to The Tree of Life. Her more recent success in television (A BAFTA win for Killing Eve; an Emmy nomination for Fleabag) has brought Shaw to a wide...
FILMHOUNDS Magazine •

Silent Friend - FILMHOUNDS Magazine

Friend opens with footage of a seed, bursting open and bringing forth shoots. It's a remarkable process, one that we take for granted in our more dynamic lives. Ildikó Enyedi's film operates in a similar way. Telling three stories that look and sound simple on the surface, each one branches out in unexpected ways, until all find their full expression in the shadow of a tall tree that's older than all of us.
Enyedi's latest film is an ambitious attempt to find common ground across time. It finds...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Kenny Dalglish Review: Long Live The King

Asif Kapadia’s Kenny Dalglish is a heartfelt tribute to the Scotland and Liverpool legend, albeit lacking the bite of his best work.


This lad from Glasgow who made good on the promise he showed from his youth seems an unlikely subject for a documentary from Asif Kapadia. The Academy Award-winning director has cornered the market on cautionary tales, but he locates enough tragedy amongst the talent in Kenny Dalglish to play to his strengths, and a compelling (if unremarkable) portrait emerges....
Loud And Clear Reviews •

La Grazia Review: Anything but Graceful

With La Grazia, Paolo Sorrentino attempts to steady his ship after Parthenope, but rehashes familiar imagery and themes in a drab production.


This means it has more in common with Loro or Il Divo, but where they had sufficient bile to match their style, La Grazia is far too cosy and sentimental to make its points. Sorrentino has gotten away with a lack of bite in his material before, but even his signature style lets him down here. A newly-found self-consciousness drains the film of the direc...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

The Death of Bunny Munro Review

Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro comes to our screens with two compelling lead performances and a smart balance between smut and sentiment.


As made clear in the first two episodes of the new mini-series that were screened at the BFI London Film Festival, this story of a man addicted to sex, alcohol and general hedonism is tailor-made for an actor who wants to shed a nice boy image, but who also wants to retain the charm and mutate it into something more primal and dangerous.


Smith is f...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Anemone Review: A Day-Lewis Family Affair

An overqualified cast and a beautiful look can’t lift Ronan Day-Lewis’ Anemone above its obvious script and direction.


A number of relationships are at work in Anemone, but at its core are two brothers. Jem (Sean Bean) journeys from his home in Sheffield to a sparse and barely habitable woodland. Deep amongst the trees lies an old cottage, with just enough comforts to house Jem’s brother, the reclusive Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis). The crux of the film’s publicity (and its whole reason for existing...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

The Vile Review: Emirati Horror Hits Home

Majid Al Ansari’s The Vile smartly and scarily shines a light on a particular indignity suffered by women in a particularly patriarchal society.


The Emirati director’s second feature may boast the largesse of Western crew and producers of such hits as Weapons and Insidious, but Al Ansari carries the tropes and style of contemporary mainstream horror over to his homeland, and uses them to effectively display the unexpected indignity of just trying to be a wife and mother in the U.A.E.


The V...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Miroirs No. 3: Curiously Calm Trauma Response

An indefinable sense of mystery lends Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 some atmosphere, but it also keeps it at a distance.


All very usual for Petzold, but he adds a layer too many of metaphor and mystery to Miroirs No. 3 that muddies the thematic waters, and ironically separates the audience from the film’s emotional beats.


Miroirs No. 3 is populated by a cast of Petzold’s regular ensemble. In her fourth collaboration with the writer-director, Paula Beer plays Laura, a university student...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Reflection in a Dead Diamond Review: A Fun Gem

Reflection in a Dead Diamond is Cattet and Forzani’s most dynamic and fun film yet, spoofing and honouring the many genres the writers-directors love.


From the first scene, husband-and-wife filmmaker duo Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet promise that their latest film is full of the sex appeal and wit that defines their features to date. However, this one also has tuxedos, ninjas and comic book panels. The directors are always playful, but they’ve never been this fun.


Since before their feat...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Magellan Film Review: Beautiful But Slow Voyage

Lav Diaz’s Magellan showcases beautiful landscapes, but the colonial critique drags under its director’s artistic temperament.


Purely by virtue of being a Lav Diaz film, Magellan was meant to be different from any comparable films about the era of European exploration and conquest of the new world. Dashing acts of heroism are in short supply, but so too are arguments about the ethics of what Magellan (Gael García Bernal, of Y Tu Mamá También) and his men are doing in Asia. Magellan is probabl...
HeadStuff •

One Battle After Another movie review | Paul Thomas Anderson masterfully reckons with This American Moment - HeadStuff

Paul Thomas Anderson is a historian. Over his nine films to date, he has charted the 20th century with remarkable insight. His history has been out of order, but the points he makes are legitimate. The early 1900s reflected the late 2000s with the pursuit of oil spurred on by corrupted religion (There Will Be Blood). The 1950s saw the cult of personality take root in men whose own personas were destroyed in war (The Master) while the rest of the world rebuilt itself in the self-important image o...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Waltzing With Brando Review: On The Beachfront

Despite Billy Zane’s transformative turn, Waltzing With Brando can’t find much new to say about the legendary Hollywood firebrand.


There’s nothing wrong in getting some laughs out of this section of Brando’s life, but Bill Fishman’s film is too broad to undermine the late actor’s ego, letting one committed performance do all the deeper digging into his subject.


Waltzing With Brando is adapted from the memoirs of architect Bernard Judge. In the late 1960s, Judge’s California-based firm spec...
HeadStuff •

The Life of Chuck movie review | sappy sentimental nonsense is a new kind of Stephen King horror - HeadStuff

Watching The Life of Chuck, one suspects that Mike Flanagan has some leftover issues from his teenage years to resolve. If he wasn’t a teen maths whizz and a member of the high school dance club, he should have been, given how cool his newest film insists these phenomena are. Of course, he’s leaning into his own interests as a writer/director here, making his third adaptation based on the works of Stephen King. As indulgent as Doctor Sleep was in entertaining King’s complaints about Kubrick’s ve...
Loud And Clear Reviews •

Young Mothers Review: When Kids Have Kids

The Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers is a simple but moving tapestry of the hardships of teenage maternity. The young actresses shine.


The young mothers of the title are five teenagers, all residing in a Liège shelter for pregnant young women. Some have already given birth, while others are approaching their due date, but they support each other by providing company and routine. Their predicament as new mothers is difficult enough, but each one has additional pressures bearing down on them, w...
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