absorbing

Child bride, infant sacrifice, bobbysoxer concubine: Priscilla Presley, wife of Elvis, is all these in Sofia Coppola’s eerily gripping, queasily claustrophobic portrait of marital loneliness, trapped behind the kitschy prison gates of Graceland while the King is away on tour, or shooting movies with glamorous worldly female co-stars and a creepily subservient male entourage. Priscilla becomes Memphis’s very own Lady Diana, with Ann-Margret or Nancy Sinatra in the Camilla Parker-Bowles role.The film is based on Elvis and…

There’s little good news to report in the field of research surrounding climate change and its far-reaching impacts on the planet, yet an international team of scientists may have found a small victory to celebrate.Using realistic ecological modeling, scientists led by Western Sydney University’s Jürgen Knauer found that the globe’s vegetation could actually be taking on about 20% more of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere and will continue to do so through to the end of the century.“What we found is that a…

Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan has delivered another of his expansive, ruminative and distinctly Chekhovian character-driven dramas. Again it is spread out across the landscape of western Anatolia, and again there is Ceylan’s emphasis on still photography and portraiture. This film does however have one very atypical touch: a very startling and Brechtian meta-moment when we are reminded this is a film we’re watching, and the tiny and flickeringly firelit interiors are created on a soundstage.It certainly does however…

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues. Franco-Cambodian film-maker Davy Chou directs, co-writing the screenplay with artist Laure Badufle, a Korean adoptee brought up in France whose personal story inspired the film.Park Ji-min makes her acting debut in a role that mirrors her own life as well as Badufle’s: a…

Here is a 1986 film co-directed by radical feminist film-maker Maureen Blackwood with artist-director Isaac Julien. Their sensibilities are a fruitful match here, creating a knotty, complex, self-questioning piece of work: drama, essay movie and video art crossover. Blackwood and Julien were drawing on the black power radicalism of the 60s and the feminism of the 80s in ways that could amount to a British new wave.In a stylised wilderness, a male and female figure confront each other ill-temperedly: the woman accusing the…

Krzysztof Kieślowski completed his Three Colours trilogy with what was to be his final film. With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.At its centre is Valentine, played by Irène Jacob, a model who has a job posing for a chewing…

This powerful but flawed animation depicts the brilliant German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, creator of a remarkable series of quasi-autobiographical gouaches entitled Life? or Theatre?, painted in the period of her exile in Vichy France from 1941 to 1943, before she was taken to Auschwitz and there murdered at the age of 26; the paintings themselves are now held in Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum.The movie is part of a vital tradition of representing the Holocaust through powerful animated images, stemming back to Art…

As ringleader of the Shins, James Mercer has left a busload of bandmates on the hard shoulder over the past two decades. His longest lasting act must be Broken Bells, this occasional project with best mate Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton. The duo’s first two albums established a pattern of flirting convincingly with various genres (new wave, folk, prog, post-punk) before ghosting them entirely. Impressive, but weirdly hard to enjoy. Into the Blue is similarly promiscuous, but more frequently dazzling.It helps that these songs…