David Lowery’s Arthurian epic THE GREEN KNIGHT, the most visually stunning film of the year, is finally here for British audiences to experience. In this retelling of the epic poem complete with rhymes, symbolism and ornate medieval inter-titles, Gwain (Dev Patel) quests to the Green Chapel, home of the enigmatic Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) after he answered his chivalric challenge a year before. For Gwain struck the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders and must now submit to an answering blow, the many challenges faced on his journey teaching him lessons about life, death, time and honour. The Green Knight is the kind of film you have to submit to, to just go with the languid pace and sometimes impenetrable ambiguity. But if you’re in the right frame of mind and spirit you will be rewarded with a gorgeously designed, vividly atmospheric mood piece that will doubtless inspire debate for years to come. SSP
Review in Brief: The Green Knight (2021)
Review in Brief: Shorta (2020)
Slickly executed, punchy and almost unbearably tense, SHORTA really makes an impact in a world where a frankly insane amount of people from minority communities are still losing their lives to police brutality. After a botched arrest in a Danish ghetto leads to the death of a young Arab man, two cops involved that sensitive case are tasked with keeping the peace but end stranded and fighting for their lives in the same deprived area as the site of their shame. Jacob Lohmann, Simon Sears as cops Mike and Jens and especially Tarek Tyat as Amos, a young victim of stop and search swept up in their predicament all deliver excellent raw performances and the direction from Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm is tightly controlled and never loses momentum. Nothing the police get up to is made to look glamorous or cool, but a sweaty, dirty nightmare that just goes from bad to worse, typified by a half-obscured brawl in a flooding bathroom. SSP
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Review in Brief: The Toll (2021)
You don’t get a Welsh gangster film every day, but THE TOLL makes you feel that’s a damn shame. It’s low-key stylish and non-linear, like PULP FICTION if it wasn’t as pleased with itself, with a rich seam of gallows humour and plenty of wry one-liners (“I used to babysit you when you were a little twat!”, “Sit down, you’re making the place look uncomfortable”). Michael Smiley is the British film industry’s go-to likeable criminal, and here he plays his toll booth godfather straight and scary as the rest of his bumbling underworld associates (including Paul Kaye and Iwan Rheon) act like they’re auditioning for the idiot parts in a Coen brothers movie. Like FARGO too there is a lone straight arrow country cop (Annes Elwy) grieving for a tragic loss and trying to keep the peace through an understanding (up to a point) with the local criminal element, but things are inevitably heading for a bloody end. SSP
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Review in Brief: Candyman (2021)
You have to respect Nia DaCosta’s CANDYMAN for going hard, not going home. In this belated sequel to the 1992 film, struggling artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his curator girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) living in the gentrified area of Chicago previously home to the deprived Cabrini-Green housing project inadvertently re-awaken the ghostly embodiment of Black pain and rage, Candyman. There’s at least half a dozen really good central concepts here when two or three would have done, so the film ends up a little crowded and unable to do entirely so justice to all of its themes, but at least leads Abdul-Mateen and Parris make for compelling and modern horror protagonists. Visually and sonically, it’s pretty stunning, with an eerie score from Robert A A Lowe, memorable shadow puppetry animation sequences to fill in the mythology of the legend as it grew over the decades and clever thematic use of mirror and world-upside-down imagery. SSP
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