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The secretive world of sumo wrestling gets thoroughly demystified in this enthralling fly-on-the-wall documentary from Erik Shirai. The Japanese-American filmmaker has previous in exploring modern Japan’s relationship with its traditions: his 2015 doc took viewers into a 144-year-old saké brewery. This elegant follow-up humanises the incredibly famous but mostly hermetic figures who compete in the sport in eye-opening ways.  Although is it a sport? Or an art form? Spirit Weighs Nothing positions sumo more as a 1500-year-old ritual where sacrifice and hard work creates spiritual as well as physical strength. Sumo was once viewed reverentially as a Shinto ritual to ensure a good harvest, even a test of strength from the gods. These days, sumo fans present in much the same way as football supporters: fanatical and obsessive. It was once one sort of religion, now it’s another. Shirai embraces the best traditions of the sports doc, following a handful of established and wannabe stars from the Sakaigawa stable (or ‘heya’) in Tokyo over 12 months of training and competition. There’s the reigning champion Terunofuji, struggling to maintain his edge as osteoarthritis takes hold – yes, already – and 24-year-old rising star Hiradoumi, who could be the next major contender. Then there’s ‘the rookie’, sociable teenager Yonezawaryu, who is learning the art but questioning his path. An ill-fated bout with a close friend brings a sorrowful note to his quest for improvement. Overseeing...

It’s unusual for the ‘making of’ a classic movie to warrant a cinema release: Hearts of Darkness (Apocalypse Now) and 78/52 (Psycho) are rare exceptions. But a documentary about the making of a notorious flop? A film so thoroughly reviled that its first public screening resulted in the audience chasing studio executives down the street? Absolutely – Boorman and the Devil is just that good. The Exorcist was a colossal hit back in 1973, a pre-Jaws, pre-Star Wars blockbuster that rewrote the rules of box-office success and scored 10 Oscar nominations, winning Best Picture. At the time, sequels were just starting to catch on – Magnum Force was the second biggest film of that year – but even if a follow-up made financial sense, was British director John Boorman, who hated Friedkin’s film, the man to make it? The Heretic, as the film was originally to be known – sequels with numbers wouldn’t catch on until The French Connection II and The Godfather Part II – was an audacious departure from the original film, with some connective tissue (Linda Blair as Regan, Max von Sydow as Father Merrin), but more metaphysical, existential, and science-over-supernatural than demonic horror – not, in other words, what audiences wanted or expected. Set across sprawling locations, Exorcist II: The Heretic drafted in Richard Burton and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher, and wasn’t so much a sequel, but, as Boorman put it, ‘a riposte’. It was, as everyone else put it,...

The second half of Antonin Baudry’s two-film French historical epic (adapted from a Julian Jackson historical tome) ramps up the rollicking action spectacles. From the opening shot of tires crunching through the desert, which wouldn’t be out of place in a Mad Max film, the message is clear: this isn’t a polite teatime vision of World War II. It’s January, 1943. A tense and elegant cross-cutting sequence, typical of the pacy and propulsive storytelling as a whole, shows the different kinds of battles the French are waging across the world. In occupied Lyon, a French resistance wireless specialist Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei) is watching a man in a phone box. In the Libyan desert, Gaullist general Philippe Leclerc (a never more dashing Niels Schneider) leads a military ambush.  Meanwhile, from the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Winston Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) and Franklin D Roosevelt (Campbell Scott) have requested the company of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle (Simon Abkarian), whose rise to power as figurehead for the resistance formed the basis of film one.  They want him to bury the hatchet with Vichy General Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte), the better to direct all energy at the common Nazi enemy. Offering light relief, in the mode of two bitchy aunties, Churchill and FDR speak in bon mots, a raised eyebrow all but audible in their voices. ‘You’re like Frankenstein, afraid of his own monster,’ says the American president. He might have an ulterior motive for trying to...

‘A sidewalk is usually poured by a contractor employed by the local municipality. And they do everything they can to keep it smooth.’ Laughing yet? You will be, when you hear it from John Wilson. As fans of his cultishly beloved show How To With John Wilson know, he has a way of turning literally any subject into an object of droll hilarity. So The History of Concrete really is a documentary about concrete. And along the way, we learn that concrete is the second most used material on the planet. (Also, not the same thing as cement!) We attend the World’s Best Bricklayer contest, a ‘mortar workability’ competition, and a lecture on geomorphology. Happily, Wilson has a talent for this kind of thing, so when he opines that ‘gum is like the birdshit of people’, you can expect a deep dive into the vagaries of sidewalk gum, including a field trip with the owner of GumBusters, ‘the only gum vaporiser in NYC’. The gum guy is also a vintner who appears to bottle wine out of his garage, which is the sort of oddball detail upon which Wilson cheerfully and rather brilliantly expands. The movie was initially inspired, for example, by a class he took on how to make a Hallmark movie. The lesson couldn’t be more basic: write a story about a big-city girl finding love with a small-town boy, and you’ve got a potential hit. And yet, this path leads us to a disquisition on the late spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, New York’s most unusual marathon, and self-transcendence. Wilson has worked with...

‘It looks good, but scary it ain’t,’ was Time Out’s verdict on the very first console-to-cinema transplant of Resident Evil way back in 2002.  Twenty-six years, eight movies and approximately a billion splattery kills later, things haven’t changed all that much. The filmmaking has had an upgrade – from the journeyman efforts of Paul WS Anderson to the more elevated craft of Weapons and Barbarian’s Zach Cregger – but the new-look take on Capcom’s gory survival game is still more goofy and good-looking than actually frightening.   Our zombie-afflicted hero this time is Weapons’ Austin Abrams – who between this and the upcoming Whalefall, in which he gets swallowed by a sperm whale, is having the most gloopy breakout year in memory.  To say he is not in the ass-kicking Milla Jovovich mold would be understating it. His medical courier, Bryan, is closer to the second coming of McLovin in Superbad as he transports a top-priority organ container to Raccoon City General. As any gamer knows, awaiting him on his drive through the snowy forests of wherever-the-heck-we-are is a whole spectrum of gross-out monsters and apocalyptic mayhem, all courtesy of the nefarious Umbrella Corporation’s out-of-control bioweapon. For a zombie horror it moves at a leisurely pace. Cregger lets the peril unfold in a slow-burn sequence involving an infected woman tumbling over Bryan’s bonnet and who he, rather sweetly, tries to care for, ignoring the blood-soaked arm she keeps thrusting in his face....

Tessa (Cynthia Erivo) is a gifted defence barrister. ‘It’s not emotional to me,’ she says. ‘It’s like a game.’ In that game, she knows precisely when to interject, expertly leading questions to ensure victory for her clients. Her speciality has become sex crimes. As a colleague observes, that’s because the optics are good for a man accused of rape to have a woman defending him. It doesn’t bother Tessa: her role is to uphold the legal system that she holds in such high esteem.  But her faith in the system is shattered when Tessa is raped by a colleague, fellow barrister Julian (The Gentlemen’s Daniel Ings). It’s a horrifying violation that shatters Tessa’s worldview, as well as her sense of safety and self. Devastated by what seemed like a promising romance blowing up in such violating fashion, she intends to use the full extent of the law against Julian in the pursuit of justice. Susanna White’s Prima Facie starts with a literal spring in its step, zooming in on Tessa’s shoes as she dances through London’s Old Bailey to some upbeat hip-hop. It’s an exciting signal that we’ve not seen something like Prima Facie before. But that energy quickly fades, and White’s film becomes highly conventional. It often feels like an episode of Law & Order, except that show has a more interesting visual texture than what’s on display here. It’s unfortunate that the film is so frustratingly familiar, especially given that the one-woman play it’s based on bucks convention at every turn. The...

If Ken Loach did comic-book adaptions, they might look a little like Paul Andrew Williams’ bold vision of ordinary lives and supernatural intervention. The British director, working from his own (very) original screenplay, draws an arrestingly raw performance from Erin Doherty and a tantalisingly ambiguous one from James McAvoy. The ending is mawkish and felt misjudged, but Faith still got under my skin in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  Williams likes to cross genre lines and here he tosses together kitchen sink realism, warm humanism, grief drama, and a twist that might just have spilled out of Keanu Reeves supernatural schlockfest Constantine. Those layers are slowly revealed in Faith’s unnamed British town (filmed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire), prior to a denouement that turns into a test of faith in the filmmaker’s vision.   A world away from her porcelain Princess Anne in The Crown, the excellent Doherty’s single mum Gina is a broken vase that needs glueing back together. She struggles to support her bullied son Jamie (Hamnet’s Smylie Bradwell) and with the strains of making ends meet and dealing with hostile neighbours. McAvoy’s mysterious stranger Michael could be the man to help. She sees him standing at the bar at her local quiz night and he’s soon slipping her a few answers and buying her a drink. They end up walking home together and an easy connection forms. The denouement turns into a test of faith in the filmmaker’s vision  Gina is initially touched by his...

Some films are important regardless of their cinematic quality. They have an urgency and a relevance that go beyond aesthetic consideration. This new film from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind Palestinian-Israeli Oscar-winner No Other Land, is one of those. And it’s one of the year’s best. The film consists of the testimony of 24 anonymous ex-members of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The interviews take place in the dark on rooftops in Tel Aviv, overlooking apartment buildings and streets where the night-time traffic passes. A plane will fly overhead or an alarm, warning of an imminent missile attack, but for the rest of the time, Abraham diligently questions his subjects and listens to what they have to say.  These are the men and women who operate the machinery of the Israeli war machine that was unleashed on Gaza and in the Occupied Territories following the atrocious attacks of October 7, 2023. They are anonymous shapes in the dark with quiet reasonable voices. They speak of their initial rage and determination to exact revenge for the Hamas attacks. The ‘Nazas’ are the collateral damage, the innocent men, women and children who have no connection to Hamas or terrorist organisations.  The rules of engagement allow for the killing of 20 Naza for one Hamas suspect, we are told. Soon that limit is done away with. One of the men designed an algorithm for AI – called ‘Lavender’ – to detect Hamas operatives via their phones. Another has a program...

Fans of strong-scented perfumes will be disappointed to learn that director Alex Gibney’s Musk is actually about Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man. Other viewers will be impressed with the scope and scale of this riveting documentary which flies by despite running at almost four hours – 235 minutes including a 10-minute intermission – and gives plenty of insight into who he really is. Many will already have formed certain ideas about Musk from his actions – if nothing else his $288 million donation to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign indicates where he stands politically, alongside his bullish Twitter takeover and subsequent reinstatement of banned right wing accounts. Gibney brings detailed analysis of Musk’s relationship with Trump and how he turned Twitter into X, along with a concerning final section about his foray into AI. Musk refused to participate in the documentary, so his words are culled from existing quotes and spoken by an AI avatar, though there’s also a huge amount of archive footage of him being interviewed, overseeing rocket-building at Space X, unveiling new Tesla models and so forth. Many key people in his life are interviewed on camera, including creepy father Errol and mother Maye, ex-wife Justine Musk, ex-girlfriend Ashley St Clair, alongside former employees and journalists who’ve covered his work on the tech beat. Musk has a bonkers belief in creating a ‘legion’ of children before a civil war erupt There are many staggering facts in...

Bad Apples opens with the chirruping of feathery creatures, but what follows is anything but birdsong. In this bleak comedy, Jonatan Etzler dreams up a nightmarish educational scenario: a teacher kidnapping a student on the eve of an Ofsted inspection. Absurdist plot twists follow, as well as an unexpected pivot into dark and unsettling terrain. It follows Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a downtrodden teacher trying her best to connect with her ten-year-old pupils. The reigning brat of the class, Danny (Eddie Waller), places catastrophic strain on Maria’s personal and work life, pushing her to ever greater risks to keep him at arm’s length during school hours. But then an after-school encounter with Danny turns violent. The meek Maria turns into an unassuming kidnapper, locking the kid in the basement, and a boisterous hostage scenario is soon unfolding. At night, Maria’s farming simulator game drowns out Danny’s basement tantrums; in the daytime, Maria is showered with praise when the school inspection is a success. With Danny being served pesto pasta in a harness fit for a large dog, it’s clear the situation is as dire as it is downright hilarious. Saoirse Ronan is, as ever, the best thing here As Maria and Danny enter a surrogate mother/son territory during their time in the basement, we get a glimpse of who Danny is behind the school-bully mask. The pair bond during their basement tutor sessions and shared video game banter – tender yet ludicrous moments, where you’d think...