Written and directed by Danny Boyle (with Simon Beaufoy also working on the screenplay), 127 Hours is a dramatisation of Aron Ralston’s escape from Bluejohn Canyon in 2003. An experienced canyoneer, Ralston was pinned by a boulder for five days before amputating his arm and hiking eleven miles to rescue. While this subject matter is striking it’s not an immediately cinematic prospect but Boyle comes up with an ingenious formal solution and aesthetic conceit. Apart from a brief preamble in…
Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is quite an extraordinary achievement. It was filmed entirely in secret and smuggled out of Iran to screen at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. This fact of its production also resonates strongly with its subject matter – a dissection of the thresholds between inside and outside, knowledge and ignorance, self and other, and male and female domains in contemporary Iranian society. Rasoulof’s screenplay revolves around a middle-class family – father Imam (Missagh…
Although Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film may be the most famous version, 12 Angry Men actually started out as a teleplay, which Reginald Rose subsequently adapted for the theatre and cinema. Released in 1997, William Friedkin’s telemovie aims to get back to that original moment, if only to open up the story for a new generation. To that end, he more or less discards Lumet’s immaculate tracking-shots and unbroken takes, replacing them with a loose, languorous Steadicam that rides the waves…
Fatso is not only the first and only film written and directed by Anne Bancroft, but one of the most powerful films to come to with that quintessentially American condition – overeating. Or, for Bancroft, that Italian-American condition, since this is first and foremost a wonderfully delirious vision of Italian-American culture as one giant oral fixation, and every Italian-American institution, from communion to cannoli, as one great ample-breasted mother, doling out culinary consolement at every turn, especially in an…
