hallucinatory

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance. Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel – working with co-writer Jon Spaihts – draws on David Lean, George Lucas and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in the (perhaps inevitable) mega-stadium combat scene with the tiny billions of CGI crowds in the bleachers. But he really…

Musician turned film-maker Amanda Kramer gave us a retro campy reverie of queer longing in her previous feature Please Baby Please which, though interesting, was oddly unsatisfying and insubstantial. This works much better: a genuinely strange and unsettling creation whose meaning and form can’t quite be pinned down.It appears to be an imaginary standalone primetime US TV special which went out in some alternative dream-universe between 1975 and 1985; it is centred on one particular star, a brassy, heart-on-sleeve…

Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s National Gallery in 2021, makes his feature film debut with a visually striking, ruminative and mysterious piece of work, a kind of magic social realist vision. The script was developed with two French cinema heavyweights, producer and screenwriter Geoffroy Grison and director Bertrand Bonello and it premiered at Cannes in 2022 in the Directors’ Fortnight section.It is a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with flourishes of…

Goran Stolevski does not like being in front of the camera. “That was the most uncomfortable 25 minutes of my life,” the Macedonian-Australian director laughs over the phone, after a Guardian photoshoot in Melbourne’s Edinburgh Gardens. There’s something artificial, he says, about sitting still, subjecting yourself to the steely gaze of a lens. He glimpsed a test shot at one point and winced.If the past 12 months are anything to go by, he’ll have to get used to the exposure. In that time, Stolevski’s debut feature You…

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s macabre gothic romance from 1932 is now rereleased for its 90th anniversary. It’s an eerie, semi-silent classic which really does have the uncanny quality of a bad dream, in which event follows event with an unhurried somnambulist confidence. All early cinema, or maybe all cinema of any period, has that unspoken I-see-dead-people fascination: the spectacle of dead or forgotten actors revivified and brought back to undead life – and this is very appropriate for Vampyr.It’s a film which took as its…