 |
| Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name |
Timothée Chalamet has been turning heads on the Venice red carpet in red this week and you and you can catch the indie film that propelled him to stardom this week. He navigates the turbulent emotional landscape of teenager Elio in Luca Guadagnino's erotic coming-of-age tale that throbs with the heat of Italian summer and Elio's sexual awakening after an older US intern (Armie Hammer) comes to stay with his family. While I don't think this is quite the masterpiece some would claim - I'd argue it ends up being a little too politely chaste for its own good - it's still a very well-honed, beautifully shot and expertly acted piece of cinema that might even gain from the intimacy of the small screen. To bring the conversation back to clothing, you can read what the director told us about the costume design here.
The Impossible, Great Movies, 9pm, Tuesday September
Emotion is to the fore in Juan Antonio Bayona's disaster movie that focuses on a single family in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami that hit south-east Asia on Boxing Day in 2004 and is based on a true story. It's also, like Call Me By Your Name, an opportunity to see a star in the making as a very young Tom Holland makes a lasting impression as youngster Lucas, who tries to man up for his mother (Naomi Watts) after she is badly hurt when they are swept up by the flood. The tsunami itself is presented with gut-wrenching realism but the visceral action is followed up by just as intense performances from Watts and Ewan McGregor - better than he had been in years - as the father desperate to find his family.
Godzilla, 6.25pm, Great Movies, Wednesday, September 7
The spectacle cinema in Roland Emmerich's film is altogether bigger and blousier than that served up by Bayona - and, as a result, nowhere near as good. Despite that, this loud-and-proud-about-it creature feature from 1998 is one of his more engaging outings. There's a tacit acknowledgement of how silly some of this as Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno take on the many-storeyed lizard as it crashes about New York - but then it's quite hard to play this sort of monster mayhem entirely straight without becoming an unfortunate casualty. Sometimes, it's nice to just sit back and enjoy things being exploded, crushed and generally marmalised with impressive technical skill and no emotional commitment - and if that's what you're in the mood for then this is for you.
This Is Spinal Tap, 10.15pm, BBC4, Thursday, September 8
The trick is in the tone of this Heavy Metal send up, as Spinal Tap (played by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer) gear up for a comeback tour and a new album - the fabulously named Smell The Glove - while being followed by a documentarian (Rob Reiner). There's something sweetly charming about these lads in a film which also gets its musical notes right. There is currently a sequel - made by the original team - in the works for a 2024 release. "You want to honor the first one and push it a little further with the story,” Reiner told Deadline - wonder if he'll turn it up to 12?
Bacurau, 1.20am, Film4, Friday, September 9
Anne Katrin-Titze writes: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ film is breathtaking from the start with Gal Costa singing Não Identificado by Caetano Veloso. From outer space and through the stars we discover Earth and land on a little spot in the Northeast of Brazil, called Bacurau. It isn't found on any map and you might even think that it is a kind of Brigadoon, a village that regularly sinks into the sands of time. We are not in the past, but in the future, one so close that you can almost touch the splendid sunsets, while wondering about the many coffins being delivered. We soon meet Sônia Braga, who plays the town’s doctor. She is devastated and drunk during a funeral which allows us to get a first glimpse at the lay of the land. Something is terribly wrong here. The phone reception is bad. In Polanski Chinatown fashion, the water supply is cut off for the area, also mirroring the very real water shortage in the Northeast of Brazil. Horses from the farm nearby run loose through the village one night. A local politician dumps a pile of books, as if it were a gift of garbage, made to be set on fire (François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 may come to mind), rather than read. For centuries, the best tales of magic were told and retold because of their combination of the supernatural with our deepest darkest fears, a utopian setting with very real dilemmas, and a hopeful ending that speaks to our sense of justice. Bacurau harbours that heritage. Read our conversations with the directors: Another Layer, A heightened state and In directions nobody goes, our interview with Sônia Braga.
The Remains Of The Day, 2.15pm, BBC2, Friday, September 9
Hopefully you'll still have some hankies left after watching The Impossible and Call Me By Your Name because you're certainly going to need them for this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel. A buttoned up butler (Hopkins) whose job comes before everything else finds his life changing after his former lord and master Lord Darlington (James Fox) - a man who might be rather too sympathetic to the Nazis - dies and the estate is taken over by an American millionaire (Christopher Reeves). Essentially a will they/won't they romance between Hopkins' butler and Emma Thompson's young housekeeper, it rides on the pair's delicately worked performances and comes with all the sumptuous period trappings you'd expect from full Merchant Ivory.
Buried, 1.55am, Film4, Saturday, September 10
I seem to be unintentionally celebrating Spanish filmmakers this week, and if Juan Antonio Bayona went big with The Impossible, Rodrigo Cortés proves how powerful things can be when you keep them simple. In his claustrophobic thriller a US contractor in Iraq (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up to discover he has been buried alive. For company in the box, all he has is a lighter, a couple of glow sticks and a mobile phone - with his captor demanding ransom before his oxygen runs out. Despite the tight confines, Eduard Grau's camerawork is endlessly inventive and Reynolds puts in a surprisingly physical performance considering the limitations of the box.
This week's short selection this week is Johnny Barrington's Tumult, which features Icelandic star Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson as the chief of a band of Norse Warriors. Barrington currently has a feature, Silent Roar, in the works about a young surfer dealing with the loss of his father - so that's one to look out for in future.
T U M U L T from johnny barrington on Vimeo.
