As the film festival circuit returns to semi-normal – Cannes wrapped a delayed but successful edition last month, with Venice and Toronto both taking place as scheduled this September – not everyone is keen to return to business as usual. For many cinephiles who are unable, even under the best of circumstances, to travel to all corners of the globe to catch new films, the pandemic-induced wave of online festivals was an improvement, not a compromise. Expect more festivals to consider the virtues of increased accessibility even when local in-person events are possible.
One such example is the Edinburgh international film festival, usually held in June, which is returning to a delayed live edition this Wednesday – overlapping for the first time in years with the Edinburgh fringe – but will maintain a hybrid physical-digital format. (The fringe, too, is making itself available to digital audiences: a number of its performances will stream online.) And while most of the big-name UK premieres in the film lineup will be limited to in-person screenings, a worthwhile programme of 20 features, alongside several short film collections, will be available to view online for 72 hours following their premieres over the next two weeks.
Among them are a few genuine crackers, none wilder than Mad God, a raucous adult fantasy rendered in dizzying stop-motion animation by director Phil Tippett. An Oscar-winning visual effects veteran of such blockbusters as Star Wars and Jurassic Park, here he lets both his artistry and his id run wild. Following an unnamed assassin through a writhing hellscape that feels equally influenced by Dante, Brueghel and Ray Harryhausen, it’s not plot-forward film-making: it’s the world-building, in all its visceral, macabre detail, that grips and fascinates. This has been a passion project of Tippett’s for 30 years, and it comes with the exhilarating madness of truly obsessive art.
There’s somewhat cosier fun to be had in Ninjababy, a film that manages to be very nearly as good as its title. The Norwegian director Yngvild Sve Flikke has made a smart, spiky pregnancy comedy that avoids the sentimental pitfalls of the genre. Instead, it maintains the youthful swagger of its 23-year-old protagonist, Rakel (wonderfully played by Kristine Kujath Thorp), an independent-minded cartoonist with no interest in settling down, who doesn’t discover she’s pregnant until it’s too late for an abortion. Flikke unpacks the ramifications of this dilemma with equal parts empathy and irony, while the film is further enlivened by witty animated interludes that give presence to the life growing inside her. It’s all too easy to imagine Ninjababy succumbing to softened American remake treatment: best to say you saw it first.
In a more solemn register, Iranian drama Ballad of a White Cow impressed at Berlin earlier this year, and its shadowed, deliberate restraint has stuck with me. Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s film centres on the widow of a recently executed man who seeks to clear his name, and piles up misfortunes in a way that could feel luridly overbearing, but instead takes on the purity of a moral parable. There’s also a tense moral architecture of sorts to Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s new film The Beta Test, though it bends and twists with erotic, black-comic impulses. Cummings’s own jockish screen charm perfectly anchors the story of a slick Hollywood agent drawn into a spiral of sexual temptation, brutal self-effacement and cancel culture on the eve of his wedding.
Finally, the highlight of an intriguing documentary lineup is another Iranian selection, Firouzeh Khosrovani’s remarkable Radiograph of a Family, which won the top prize at last year’s IDFA documentary festival. As the title suggests, it finds the film-maker intimately mapping the tumultuous story of her parents’ marriage. The surprise is how Khosrovani persuasively grafts a perceptive sociocultural study of her homeland on to that personal narrative. It’s the kind of jewel that could be lost outside a festival context: I’m glad Edinburgh has taken the extra step of beaming it into our homes.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Beckett
(Netflix)
This old-fashioned wrong-man thriller recently opened the Locarno film festival en route to its Netflix premiere, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s highbrow. Following John David Washington’s vacationing American as he’s forced to go on the run after a tragic accident in Greece, it’s a formula film through and through – shakily scripted, but with scenery and star power that make it diverting.
Those Who Wish Me Dead
(Amazon/iTunes)
Another thriller of the type that would have been a big multiplex hit in the 90s, Taylor Sheridan’s tale of a forest firefighter (Angelina Jolie) entangled in a murky political conspiracy is at least three types of genre pulp in one, all of them reasonably entertaining. It’s most notable, however, for casting a doughty Jolie – still a megastar, though only a part-time actor these days – as something resembling a human being.
Minamata
(Curzon Home Cinema)
There was a time when a handsomely made, serious-minded biopic starring a heavily made-up Johnny Depp as a photojournalist uncovering a massive industrial waste would have been a big, Oscar-chasing deal. Depp’s stock may have fallen, but he gives his most honest, unaffected performance in some time here, and the film, while no gamechanger, is sturdy and affecting.
