Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 13 – The Wife  

Glenn Close is unreadably brilliant as author's spouse plunged in late-life crisis

5/5stars5 out of 5 stars.

*****

As the apparently-perfect wife of a Nobel prize-winning writer, Close gives arguably her best ever performance in an adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel

Peter Bradshaw
Tue 12 Sep 2019

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here’s nothing more dangerous than a writer whose feelings have been hurt.” The speaker is Joan Castleman, the charming, enigmatically discreet and supportive wife of world-famous author and New York literary lion Joe Castleman. It is a fascinating and bravura performance from Glenn Close, in this hugely enjoyable dark comedy from director Björn Runge, adapted by Jane Anderson from the novel by Meg Wolitzer. Perhaps it’s Close’s career-best – unnervingly subtle, unreadably calm, simmering with self-control. Her Joan is a study in marital pain, deceit and the sexual politics of prestige. It’s a portrayal to put alongside Close’s appearances in Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction. This is an unmissable movie for Glenn Close fans. Actually, you can’t watch it without becoming a fan – if you weren’t one already.

The Castlemans are on the plane to Sweden, ready for Joe to get the Nobel prize. Yet they are being pestered on the flight by a certain Nathaniel Bone, part stalker-fan, part parasitic hack who wants Joe to cooperate with a warts-and-all biography he is planning to write. Joe gives him the contemptuous brush-off but Joan cautiously advises a more diplomatic treatment. It is a key moment in this hugely enjoyable drama when things begin to fall apart.

Jonathan Pryce is excellent as the cantankerous and conceited old writer, a man now childishly addicted to praise and luxuriating in his colossal quasi-Bellow reputation. Christian Slater is the insidious and dangerous Bone. Max Irons plays Joe’s moody son David who also has plans to be writer, desperately needing the old man’s approval and yet prickly and resentful at Joe’s sorrowing criticisms of his work – criticisms which do not convey any great reassurance that his son has chosen the right career. And there is an unsettling moment in his Stockholm hotel suite when the great man appears not to recognise the name of one of his own characters. Is Joe succumbing to dementia?

And of course Close plays Joan, a woman much loved and admired within Joe’s circle of acquaintance: supportive helpmeet, mother – soon to be grandmother – and deeply affectionate spouse, apparently happy with a life lived in the titan’s shadow. Yet everyone is aware of a difficult truth; despite Joe blandly telling people at these cocktail parties that his wife “doesn’t write”, Joan had her own literary ambitions as a young woman. Joe’s moment of Nobel triumph appears to be triggering a late-life crisis in Joan.

Flashbacks to the 1950s and 60s show her as a co-ed taking a creative writing class with the young, insufferably pompous and married Professor Joe Castleman – who has himself only published minor short stories. She flirts, babysits his children and submits an outrageously seductive short story to his class, entitled The Faculty Wife. Things go as expected and soon Joan is wife number two, with a perennial suspicion that as Joe’s eye once roved to her, it could rove on to other people. Joe continues to stray, right up to the Nobel ceremony – and the film’s present-day section is set in the Clinton 1990s, when denying having sexual relations with younger women had become a political trope.

The film shows how Joan’s own literary ambitions began to wither in that sexist time and place: Elizabeth McGovern has an amusing cameo as an embittered minor author who advises her to give it all up. Later she gets a job as a reader in a publishing house whose smug and cynical editors are looking for “a Jewish writer”. Shrewdly, she puts Joe’s manuscript forward and his journey to greatness has begun.

The intrusive and insistent Bone thinks he has figured out the secret of Joe’s success and that of their troubled marriage. Yet for all Bone’s investigative excitement, the movie shows he still does not fully understand the truth about them, and perhaps Joan has herself not fully understood the nature of her wifely submission until that moment. The final plot turn can be read as a parable for patriarchal politics and the artist’s prestige: when people read novels, they are not merely responding to a text, they are consuming the artist’s prestige and reputation, which is itself a created performance. It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK / No 12 / Shoplifters

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 11 – Shoplifters

 Kore-eda's audacious latest steals the heart

This Palme d’Or-winning drama about a Japanese family of crooks who lift a lost little girl from the streets is a satisfying and devastating gem

The 10 best films of 2013 / No 9 /  I Wish

PETER BRADSHAW

WED 21 NOV 2018

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irokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is a complex, subtle, mysterious film that builds to the most extraordinary surprise ending, a twist-reveal worthy of psychological suspense noir. Yet the film is nothing like that generically. In fact, it is another of the intricate and nuanced family dramas in the classical Japanese style, of which Kore-eda has made himself a modern master. Its significant plot shifts happen unobtrusively, almost invisibly, except for those big, heart-wrenching revelations in its final section. I admired Shoplifters very much the first time I saw it at the Cannes film festival earlier this year (it was the winner of the Palme d’Or), while also feeling that his masterpiece was still his 2011 film I Wish, which has a pellucid, almost transcendental simplicity that Shoplifters didn’t quite have.

I Wish is still my favourite Kore-eda film, but, on a second viewing of Shoplifters for its UK release, I can see how the comparison was ungenerous. This is a brilliant and audacious film, one of his very best, a study of family trauma and fear of poverty, reviving themes from earlier films such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Like Father Like Son (2013). For all its calm gentleness, the film, which is based on a news story, is devastatingly clear-sighted about modern Japan, its dysfunctions and hypocrisies. Watching this, I found myself thinking of the Pink Floyd lyric: “Quiet desperation is the English way …” It’s the Japanese way as well.

Lily Franky (from Like Father Like Son) plays Osamu, a man with a shifty, wheedling grin. He is effectively the Fagin-like head of an extended family of roguish people all nursing secrets and lies. This household appears to be a middle-aged husband and wife, a teen daughter (or perhaps younger sister to the wife?), a young son and a grandma – all living together in a cramped apartment rented from a suspect landlord who has to keep changing the names on his properties’ title deeds as part of his tax dodge of “flipping” notional ownership.

Theoretically a casual labourer on construction sites, Osamu actually makes his money selling the things he steals on daily shoplifting expeditions with his boy, Shota (Kairi Jyo). His wife, Noboyu (Sakura Andô), works in a hotel laundry and she, too, steals things left in clothes’ pockets all the time. The younger woman is Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) who brings in her share of the family finances by taking part in a soft-porn peep show in town. Hatsue is the grandma, who supports this family with her pension and who also guilt-trips the grownup children of her late husband’s second wife into giving her money, which she mostly pours into pachinko slot machines. Hatsue is wonderfully played by veteran Japanese character actress Kirin Kiki. It was her last performance; she died in September this year.

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One day, coming home on a freezing night after a hard day stealing from supermarkets, Osamu and Shota come across a little girl of perhaps six or seven shivering in the cold. Impulsively, Osamu decides to take the poor homeless little waif in for a few days. She appears to have marks on her body consistent with abuse and she wets the bed: another classic sign. Osamu’s wicked old heart is evidently melted, and he says that they will keep this little girl, Juri (Miyu Sasaki), and train her up in the ways of shoplifting, which include making odd little hand gestures to your thief-partner to indicate when and what you intend to steal. And this despite the TV news broadcasts about this little girl having gone missing.

But it is not just a question of Osamu finding redemption in doing good, nor is it a simple irony in Osamu’s crook-family fulfilling the function of the social services and the caring state – the state that would disapprove of and indeed prosecute Osamu if it knew what he was up to. The point is that Osamu has, in his amoral way, stolen Juri in just the same way as he steals everything else. And it isn’t the first time he’s done it. His ambiguously benevolent abduction of Juri is part of a larger pattern of concealment in which the whole family unit is involved. Nothing is what it seems.

It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles. Shoplifters is the story of a group of frightened, damaged people who have made common cause with each other, banded together under the convenience flag of family, under the radar of the law, making the best of things from day to day, until they realise they have been making the worst of things. A rich, satisfying and deeply intelligent film.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK / No 11 / The Square

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 11 – The Square 

Ruben Östlund turns art world satire into performance-art cinema

The Force Majeure director returns with a thrillingly weird study of an art gallery director whose life goes into meltdown after his mobile phone is stolen

Cannes 2017 / Ruben Östlund wins Palme d'Or for The Square

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 19 May 2017

R

uben Östlund’s sprawling and daringly surreal satire The Square turns a contemporary art museum into a city-state of bizarre, dysfunctional and Ballardian strangeness. It is a place where one important person’s guilt infects an entire society with a creeping nervous breakdown, at once intensified and yet camouflaged by a notional belief in aesthetic nonconformism and provocative performance art. This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces. It doesn’t have the pure weapon-like clarity of Östlund’s previous film Force Majeure. But it sets out to make your jaw drop. And it succeeds.

Like Force Majeure, it centres on a mobile phone. Christian (Claes Bang) is the well-heeled director of a contemporary art museum: the very epitome of a stylish European media professional and man about town. He wants and needs his gallery to make a splash and is persuaded by his PR team that what is needed is something provocative, unusual, challenging and performance-related, something that could generate controversy on social media. He hits on an idea called The Square, an enclosed space in which people are told to behave responsibly.

Whatever that means, Christian is deeply shocked when his phone and wallet are stolen in the square in front of the museum in a theatrically cunning pickpocket scam which is far more ingenious and effective than any performance art in his museum. Infuriated, he uses his “find my phone” app to track down his handset and, in a weird mood of aggressive bravado, sets out to take revenge which brings a horrible blowback.

Christian affects to be amused by the thieves’ daring and his elaborately suppressed humiliation and rage seems to be displaced into the workplace; it seems to find its way into the cultural water-supply. A poisoned-herd strangeness is all about. He has a sexual adventure with a TV interviewer called Anne (Elisabeth Moss), who chats him up at the museum’s season-opener party by impersonating the person with Tourette’s who had disrupted the museum’s onstage discussion with a famous artist, Julian, played by Dominic West.

Their eventual liaison is soured by a tense argument over a condom and by a strange pet that Anne keeps on her apartment – a pet which is to find a nightmare echo in a showpiece performance artist that the museum is promoting. Eventually, Anne’s post-sex confrontation of the commitment phobe Christian takes place in the museum, next to an installation-display showing a teetering pile of stacked chairs - and it is as if their toe-curlingly squirmy argument is all part of the show.

And most excruciating of all is the grand formal dinner that the museum puts on for all its biggest celebrities and wealthiest patrons. The star of the show is a performance artist called Oleg, someone who pretends to be an ape. The post-dinner entertainment will be provided by Oleg who will clamber into the dining hall – grunting and scratching and hooting and maybe poking the diners – and the guests in all their finery will naturally be amused by the resulting Darwinian insights. But Oleg has an intense method-style commitment to his act and it gets out of control. (He is played by the American actor and movement expert Terry Notary, who contributes motion-capture performances to the Planet of the Apes films.)

The ape/dinner sequence really is a cold-sweat-inducing theatre of cruelty and fear: a Stanford Experiment in accepting public humiliation. Östlund may have been inspired by Roy Andersson or maybe Lars Von Trier. There is a drop of Buñuel there too – but Östlund’s own signature is plain. This is high wire cinema.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 10 – Hereditary

Increasing the sense of impending horror to almost unbearable intensity, Ari Aster’s terrifying debut caused convulsions – without a jump-scare in sight

Peter Bradshaw
Monday 10 December 2018


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his year, first-time director Ari Aster gave us a scary movie which gave us all the delicious pleasures of big-screen fear, along with a killer lead performance. That perennially excellent actor Toni Collette gave us some of the best work of her career as Annie, a contemporary artist and miniaturist. She specialises in intricately wrought dioramas with scenes taken from her own life, all reduced to Lilliputian scale. Clearly, this artistic approach says something about her own control-freakery and dysfunction. Annie’s elderly mother, an unpleasant old woman with whom Annie and her husband did not particularly get on, has just died after a long history of dementia. But then she makes contact from beyond the grave, wanting somehow to take over Annie’s 13-year-old son, her grandson, and somehow claim him in the cause of evil.

Toni Collette

The atmosphere of impending horror is terrifically managed – it has something of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. It doesn’t rely on the tired digital sound-stabs and jump-scares of lesser scary movies, but that isn’t to say that Aster is too grand to give us one or two old-fashioned cattle-prod jabs. I lurched and convulsed a couple of times, once at something so normally innocuous as the childlike sound of someone doing the clip-clopping sound of a horse. There are other excellent contributions from Gabriel Byrne, playing the stolid, supportive but careworn husband, from Milly Shapiro as their daughter Charlie, and also from Alex Wolff – already a familiar player in teen and YA movies – who is very good in this.

Toni Collette

What the film’s satirical meanings are is an open question. The topic of dementia – how we should react to it and open up the conversation around it – has become more current. It could be that Hereditary is providing a complex, subversive slant on this issue. But I think it is more nihilist than that. It is more about the mental squeeze of middle-age, and the dark fear or even horror of older people, in the light of an increasingly undeniable truth that you are going to turn into one of them. When I first saw this, I wrote that it was like a death-metal version of Cries and Whispers, and the director has since revealed that he screened Cries and Whispers for the cast. Since then, I have found myself thinking more about Fanny and Alexander and its puppet theatre. There is something inexpressibly sinister about Annie’s miniatures, and the suspicion that these human beings are themselves just figures being moved around by the devil himself.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 9 – Coco

Mexico’s Day of the Dead unearths family secrets in a Pixar animation whose impact has grown since its relatively low-key release

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ast year, on its US release, this charming Pixar animation didn’t even make our American top 50 films of 2017 list: that may have been a simple oversight or a reflection of the fact it arrived late in the year. But more likely its presence in this year’s UK top 10 owes something to the incremental increase in affection and reputation of a film that – compared to the likes of Incredibles 2 or Finding Dory – failed to ignite the hysterical advance buzz that tends to accompany most Pixar releases.

On the face of, Coco may have been hampered initially by the fact that it looks pretty traditional by Pixar standards: notwithstanding the Mexican setting and clear interest in providing a corrective to standard white-bread animation. (But in truth it might have gone a little further; had it started production now it would undoubtedly have had a girl as the principal character.)

Twelve-year-old Miguel is one of those big-eyed Disney moppets who hail from an almost pre-Pixar world – we’re a long way from, say, Riley in Inside Out – and Coco might have buckled if he and his yen to play guitar had been the film’s sole attraction.

But no. Miguel has a convoluted family life, mostly involving a bevy of relatives still enraged at the disappearance of his musician great-great-grandfather decades ago and consequently loathing all forms of music. He picks up a guitar inside the family sepulchre on Mexico’s Day of the Dead and bingo – he is transported to the underworld in the company of the actual deceased.

Rather like in The Book of Life – another Dia de los Muertos animation, from 2014 – this brain-frazzling plot point allows the animators to go bananas: a luridly imagined dead zone, overrun by frenzied hordes of skeletons and packed with enormous, ramshackle buildings. It really is spectacular, beautiful stuff, picked out in DayGlo colours and intricately detailed design.

Miguel’s story – which involves lifting the strummer’s curse, and the exact identity of the person whose face has been ripped out of an old photograph – allows the storytellers to get into some profound areas about life and death, and the function of memory. These concepts perhaps are not sketched out with quite the brilliance and elan of Inside Out, but are nonetheless rendered a feelingly intelligent way, and perhaps just right for the tweenagers in the audience. In stepping back from the zappy, kidult-orientated entertainment-complex it pioneered, Pixar crafted something rather lovely. 

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 8 – Widows

Steve McQueen’s heist drama is starry, sleek and majestically composed, with an emotional depth that sets it apart

Catherine Shoard

Wednesday 12 December 2018

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teve McQueen’s previous film, 12 Years a Slave, won the best picture Oscar (plus supporting actress and adapted screenplay), the best picture Bafta (plus best actor), the Golden Globe for best drama and innumerable other prizes, including, perhaps most significantly, best director at the inaugural (and final) Guardian film awards.

It performed surprisingly well at the box office, too, taking $56m in the US despite scenes of a wildly upsetting nature, and changing the ambition, scope and effect of cinema for ever. (McQueen was, amazingly the first black director whose film won the top gong.) It also – not a little thing, this – affected many generations’ perception of the reality of slavery and its legacy for modern-day race relations.

Last week, McQueen’s follow-up failed to bag even a single Golden Globe nomination. It has also underperformed at the box office, so far taking less worldwide than Slave made in the States alone.

Why? On paper at least, Widows is an eminently commercial prospect: a whopping glossy thriller, with big stars (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell), dazzling explosions, babes in vests firing off rounds of ammo and some flashy villainous business from Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya.

It has a top – and topical – plot about a bunch of inexperienced women planning a big-bucks heist in Chicago to get heavies off their back, the genius of their plan being that their gender renders them all but invisible.

But for something so apparently mainstream it is also leftfield. I’m not sure what I was expecting Britain’s most talented director to do next, but it probably wasn’t to update a Lynda La Plante ITV big-hair mini-series from the mid 80s. It’s less audacious and ambitious than McQueen’s predecessor; essentially, it’s a genre piece, albeit one with the sort of sleekness and style you’d associate with a winner of the Turner prize.

What makes it great is its sombreness. This is a film that, despite some lighter touches, is steeped in fatalism and even grief. It’s reluctant to offer the kind of catharsis most action flicks indulge in – or even that audiences were permitted in the final scenes of Slave. It is majestically composed and spare; as much a meditation on the mourning process as a sisters-are-doin’-it-for-themselves slamdunk.

This is also, perhaps, what means it has proved resistible for audiences eager for either a sugar-rush brain-twister or a meaty piece of arthouse. It’s a pity: Widows is wonderful. Yes, it’s not McQueen’s best. But few films ever could be.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 7 – Cold War

A couple’s passionate relationship mirrors postwar Poland’s political turmoil in Paweł Pawlikowski’s romantic epic

Andrew Pulver
Thu 13 Dec 2018

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aving smashed his last film out of the park – the Oscar-winning Ida from 2013 – Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski repeated the feat with Cold War, which has already won him the best director award at Cannes and a bunch of best foreign-language nominations. It is superficially similar to Ida – period Polish setting, stylish black and white photography, a preoccupation with Poland’s past socio-historical compromises – but there the resemblance ends. While Ida was a spare, distilled piece that perfectly reflected the unspoken crisis beneath its frozen surface, Cold War is more obviously epic and romantic, with an overpowering appeal to universal values.

Cold War, as its title indicates, is clearly working on two levels: it’s a reference to the geopolitical events that irretrievably marked entire generations in eastern Europe – including Pawlikowski’s parents, who are named in the final credits – and which actively dominates and shapes the film’s central liaison. This is between an aspiring singer, Zula, who auditions for a folk-singing troupe and Wiktor, the troupe’s musical director who hires her; their instant, chemical passion soon develops into a cold war of its own.

Their relationship begins in 1949 as Poland is coming to terms with its enforced postwar communism, and progresses through the 50s with increasing restiveness. Escape, of course, is a possibility; and how and why each of them responds to the opportunity of shifting abroad is a key thread in the film.

But this would be nothing without the sheer drama of Zula and Wiktor’s coming together – so brilliantly played by Joanna Kulig and Tomas Kot. As we jump forward, When Harry Met Sally-style, from headlong infatuation to persistent longing to a kind of desolate, self-harming stasis, we can sense Pawlikowski intends this as an emotional biography of Poland itself. The visual brilliance of the black and white photography – from high-contrast jazz club smokiness, to the wintry chill of the Polish countryside – sets the tone superbly, and represents a second triumph for cinematographer Łukasz Żal, after his stunning work on Ida.

Pawlikowski has had one of the most interestingly peripatetic careers of modern film-makers: from his beginnings making literary documentaries for British television and his early features as part of a naturalist/improvisatory British school. His return to Poland has been the making of him as a director. Long may it continue.

THE GUARDIAN

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK / No 6 / Black Panther

Black Panter

The 50 best films of 2018: No 6 – Black Panther

Marvel broke new ground with Ryan Coogler’s exhilarating introduction to Wakanda, bringing social conscience and diversity to the increasingly tired superhero genre

Benjamin Lee
Friday 14 December 2018

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espite the slick, well-constructed framework of the Marveluniverse (an ongoing work of cinematic art compared to the slapdash scramble of the DC alternative), superhero fatigue has still been slowly creeping into their output. It was inevitable that after so many similarly structured capers, all acting as connective tissue to one another, that familiarity would breed contempt but it was less easy to predict just how grindingly dull so much of it would get.

What a joy it then was to experience Black Panther this past February; a vibrant, thrilling, intelligent and most importantly, distinctive addition to an overcrowded landscape. It managed to smoothly slide into the pre-existing canon while also leaping out from the pack with character and force, doubling up as an exhilarating action adventure and a poignant drama infused with a rare social conscience. Anyone who’d seen director Ryan Coogler’s first two films, devastating fact-based drama Fruitvale Station and rousing Rocky reboot Creed, might not have been entirely surprised by his ability to deliver both with such confidence but given the restrictive nature of the MCU, it was nothing short of a miracle that he managed to retain such staggering creative control.

Black Panther

Working with co-writer Joe Robert Cole, Coogler understood that any great superhero film needs a sturdy foundation and their sharp, humane script found a way to anchor the fantastical elements with relevancy and genuine pathos. While Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa is an effortlessly charismatic hero, the film undeniably belonged to an electrifying Michael B Jordan, whose remarkably nuanced villain Killmonger provided one of the most compelling motivations we’ve ever seen in the genre. There were tough, weighty questions being asked, especially within a big-budget studio release with race, power, responsibility and class all under the microscope. Killmonger’s fury at both the systemic racism that was killing other black men and the refusal of his extended, priviliged family to do anything about it led to an uncomfortable discussion, extending way beyond the screen and at a time when the news is still haunted by imagery of dead black bodies, it felt like a profoundly necessary blockbuster to be heralding.

Black Panther

There was also a great deal of wit, Coogler lightly zipping between tones with swift confidence, the majority of funny moments arriving courtesy of a star-making turn from Letitia Wright as Shuri, T’Challa’s gadget guru, just one of many unusually substantive roles for black women in a blockbuster of this scale. Travelling to Wakanda, the film’s fictional country in sub-Saharan Africa, was also a giddy pleasure, one of the most immersive big-screen worlds we’ve encountered in years and Coogler’s slick yet singular aesthetic, along with a pulse-pounding soundtrack produced by Kendrick Lamar gave the action scenes a thrilling buzz.

Before the release of Black Panther, the inevitability of yet more superheroes infiltrating the multiplex was a rather glum thought, but Coogler’s show-stopping hit has managed to singlehandedly reinvigorate the genre. Its record-breaking box office, coupled with the fact that it’s tipped to become the first comic-book film to score a best picture nomination at the Oscars, has changed the game and rather than dread the idea of sequels, I’m craving them.

THE GUARDIAN