5 fantastic films to watch this weekend 🎬
This week we bring you a soulful music biopic, a touching slice of life drama, and a sexy sports film from Luca Guadagnino.
The Big Screen
Challengers (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
A love triangle between Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. In other words: the movies are back, baby! Luca Guadagnino’s follow-up to his vampire romance Bones & All is another left turn for the filmmaker, swapping hot-blooded body-horror for fuzzy green balls, as our three leads engage in a battle of wits and wills on and off the tennis court. Darting between past and present, the film explores the relationship between tennis superstar turned coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and former best friends-turned-rivals Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). Challengers is a smart and sexy drama that’s a far cry from anything Guadagnino has done before, though his eye for the hottest rising stars in Hollywood remains as sharp as always.
Challengers is playing in UK cinemas from Sunday 21st April.
Civil War (dir. Alex Garland)
The response to Alex Garland's Civil War has been so firmly torn down the middle that its moment in the cultural sphere has come to resemble a civil war in and of itself. The film imagines a dystopian America where a war has erupted between an authoritarian US government and various regional factions, and journalists Lee (Kristen Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura), Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) are tasked with travelling across the war-zone to reach Washington DC, where they will interview the President of the United States. The film has been polarising due to Garland’s reluctance to flesh out the details of the politics at its centre, but if you’re a fan of some of Garland’s other work (Ex-Machina, Annihilation, Devs, 28 Days Later) you’ll know that, more often than not, he’s worth the price of admission.
Civil War is playing in UK cinemas now.
Back To Black (dir. Sam Taylor-Johnson)
It was always going to be a bumpy ride making an Amy Winehouse biopic, considering that just under a decade ago Asif Kapadia’s Amy documentary won at the Oscars and (for better or worse) established a canon on the events leading up to the singer’s tragic death at the hands of drug and alcohol addiction. While Kapadia’s documentary strongly suggests that Mitch Winehouse and Amy’s on-and-off partner Blake Fielder-Civil (her relationship with whom Back To Black, the album, was inspired by) were contributing factors to Amy’s tragic spiral, Sam Taylor-Johnson’s dramatisation attempts to bring Amy’s story back to the music. Whether she does so successfully will be up for debate, but regardless, there’s joy to be found in hearing Marisa Abela take on some of Amy’s most beloved songs in the late singer’s trademark soul-inflected croon.
Back To Black is playing in UK cinemas now. You can read our interview with star Eddie Marsan here.
Queer East Film Festival
This week saw the glorious return of Queer East, a film festival that has grown over the last handful of years from a passion project for festival director Yi Wang to a tremendous celebration of Queer East Asian film that can easily pack out a cinema. This year’s programme features acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang’s classic The River, Alice Wu’s steamy cult rom-com Saving Face, and a rare, 50th anniversary screening of Isao Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love, alongside a horde of contemporary film. This is one of the festival highlights of the year—don’t miss it.
The Queer East Film Festival is running from the 17th April - 28th April. See the full programme here.
The Small Screen
Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders)
Wim Wenders’ moving slice of life drama has finally hit streamers after a successful run on the big screen. Inspired by a visit to the Tokyo Toilet Project, Perfect Days follows the routine life of Harayama (Koji Yakusho), whose quiet and mundane existence as a toilet cleaner allows him the luxury of noticing things: the sounds of nature, the quality of a good book, the hum of jazz music through his portable CD player. Yakusho’s performance is the centrepiece of the film, a masterclass in communicating emotion through restraint, and so it’s no surprise that it earned him the Best Actor award at Cannes last year,
Though it doesn’t quite reach the poignant heights of Jim Jarmusch’s pitch-perfect 2016 film Paterson, Perfect Days is a touching homage to the Japanese slice of life film. Like the best of the genre, the hope is that it’ll leave you looking at the world a little differently than when you left it.
Perfect Days is available to stream on MUBI now.
