Features

A documentary about an art collector who in the 1920s considered herself destitute with $450,000 in her bank account, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict might sound a bit vapid, but even a passing interest in artists of the 20th century is reason enough to become acquainted with someone who met the best, bought the best and slept with the best. Derided throughout her career for being a New York heiress with an expensive hobby, Guggenheim’s honest, unaffected character pushes her through. Unlike (…)

The ironically-titled Entertainment plays hard on the expectation that a cinema audience requires something redeeming in its anti-heroes. The film is an extension of Greg Turkington’s stand-up-as-performance-art project ’Neil Hamburger’, a greasy peddler of puerile one-liners and vile, hateful patter (Turkington co-wrote the screenplay with Tim Heidecker and director Rick Alverson). In Entertainment, a fictionalised version of Turkington is presented so that his Neil Hamburger persona is (…)

Between 1999 and the year 2000, Agnès Varda took a digital camera around France filming gleaners – “glaner,” Varda’s voiceover says over shots of the encyclopaedia entry, “to gather after the harvest.” The original gleaners, made famous in rustic paintings of the 19th century, gathered left-over corn; in Varda’s film we meet the specialist gatherers of unwanted potatoes, grapes, furniture, fridges, parsley, dolls and oysters. In other hands they may have been categorised as scavengers or (…)

The BFI has just re-released ‘Love is the Devil’ on Blu-Ray. First released in 1998, this is a film portraying the destructive relationship between Francis Bacon and his muse and lover, George Dyer. The film culminates in Dyer’s suicide on the eve of one of Bacon’s triumphs, an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. Just as Dyer drops seemingly from nowhere into Francis Bacon’s chaotic London studio, so the audience of ‘Love Is The Devil’ is flung head-first into Bacon’s (…)

Carlyle plays the titular role of socially inept barber in his entertaining directorial debut, based on the first of a series of novels by Douglas Lindsay. The film kicks off with two seemingly unrelated stories unfolding in Glasgow; awkward and unpredictable Barney is unpopular with customers; he is unhappy and frustrated and is on the verge of being fired from his job. A serial killer is cutting up the bodies of young men and posting various parts to the police. A not altogether random (…)

This isn’t ’the story’ of how women got the vote. Nor is it a tale of how activists shocked the nation with their efforts to obtain suffrage for women. This is a snippet view of one (fictional) woman’s experience in a militant cell of white suffrage activists, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. But you’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema without realising that these women are members of an organised grouping, not just Mrs Pankhurst’s fanatical private army. This partly stems (…)

In 2014, Sight & Sound asked 340 critics, programmers, and filmmakers to name the best documentaries ever made. This autumn, in partnership with Sight & Sound and Open City Docs, DocHouse is running a season of ‘Filmmakers’ Favourites’, inviting award-winning documentary filmmakers to present their choices from the poll. Director Brian Hill (Songbirds [2007], The Confessions of Thomas Quick [2015]) presents his choice, Kim Longinotto’s 1988 film Divorce Iranian Style which she made (…)

Director Oliver Nias’s first feature The Return premiered at the Raindance Film Festival in London, where it was nominated for Best UK Feature. A sober, atmospheric atmospheric psychological thriller, the black and white production is an impressive first film and augurs well for Oliver’s next projects... How would you describe the genre of the film? Where did the idea come from? The Return is a psychological thriller about a small time criminal who screws up a heist and has to deal (…)

Signe Baumane’s Rocks in My Pockets is a magic realist cartoon, revelatory in its examination of the repercussions and repetitions of mental illness within a genealogy. The hand-drawn animation is flat, jerky and superimposed onto footage of gloomy papier-mâché sets painted in bold colours. Fluidity of movement takes second place to the power of transformation as humans repeatedly change into monstrous or animal versions of themselves, illustrating social and psychological tensions. The huge (…)

The Sheffield Doc/Fest Environmental Award winner charts the early days of Greenpeace and the eco-movement, from its humble beginnings as a ragtag band of hippies attempting to stop a nuclear test to the establishment of a media savvy, international campaign group. The starting point is 1971, when a small group of activists, including rookie journalist Robert Hunter, set sail from Vancouver to try and stop a US nuclear test in Amchtika, an island on the west coast of Alaska. The coverage (…)