Coming HD Movies

filmed in a photogenic but seldom shot-in corner of England (near Lynton and Lynmouth and assorted wild, rocky and wave-splashed bits in Devon), with a cast of barely knowns and a budget raised independently, Winter Ridge is the kind of plucky, low-budget British feature one so wants to like. If only it weren’t so achingly middling to its core with decidedly shabby edges, like something acquired in a package deal by a desperate distributor in the last days of the film market at Cannes.

Matt Hookings stars as Ryan, a detective constable in a small town that is experiencing an unexpected surge in mysterious deaths of elderly people. Although Ryan seems an especially dim-witted officer, eventually he starts to suspect this may be the work of a serial killer. Or perhaps the elders are being knocked off by (try not to laugh) the local vicar, after he has convinced them to leave their money to help repair the church before they go to the big pew in the sky.

Admittedly, Ryan’s judgment may be off due to his grief – his wife was left in a coma after a car accident, caused by an angry local drunk (played by the reliable Scots character actor Ian Pirie, one of the film’s few redeeming features). There’s also something fishy about the icy blond psychiatrist who treats patients with dementia, perhaps because she is played by Hannah Waddingham, an actor hardcore Game of Thrones fans will remember from season six when she played the evil Septa Unella, a nun-like zealot who marched Cersei Lannister through the streets chanting: “Shame! Shame!”

The final who-and-why-reveal is so loopy and absurd, it almost makes the film worth watching – but only if you have a taste for generic crime drama. All the same, Joao da Silva pulls out the stops with some classy cinematography.

new film by Orson Welles? Even in a vintage year like Venice 2018, that has to be something special. This is Welles’s experimental found-footage-style autobiographical movie about an unfinished movie which was ironically unfinished in Welles’s own lifetime, abandoned in financial chaos in the mid-1970s. Or perhaps this was not at all ironic. Perhaps leaving it unfinished was Welles’s ultimate, secret tribute to the central truth of The Other Side of the Wind: how the agony and the ecstasy of creative art lies in the process not the product, and how the finished work will never measure up to the ideal version in your head.

Now, under the auspices of Netflix, a 122-minute film has been retrieved from more than 100 hours of raw footage by editor Bob Murawski in association with the project’s executive producers, Peter Bogdanovich and Beatrice Welles, Orson’s daughter. The resulting work is as every bit as brilliant and chaotic and exasperating as you would expect, garrulous and madly disputatious, with plenty of tragicomic lechery and crassly dated wisecracks about Native Americans and gays. It’s a fascinating image of Welles’s own fierce self-questioning yet self-affirming state of mind, and the state of American cinema itself as the Hollywood golden age was about to give way to the New Wave.

Hannaford himself is lionised by younger generations of cineastes and critics, but paralysed by a growing legendary status which inhibits his ability to get any new creative work done, taking refuge in bleary and boorish cynicism. His friends compare him to Ernest Hemingway(a bad omen) and he actually resembles John Huston, a bit. But of course, in every important sense, he is Welles himself.

The film is the story of a party thrown in Hannaford’s honour by his friend Zarah Valeska, played by Lilli Palmer. She has invited all the cool young dudes of the New Wave generation, who all bring their cameras, and the idea is that this film is a documentary record patched together from all their verite footage. Not a single second of Jake’s final, unhappy hours has been left unrecorded by these voracious, parasitic, predatory movie brats — a clever mosaic of colour and black-and-white footage. Zarah’s plan is to give her old friend a morale-boosting infusion of fan love from the younger generation, chief among whom is his protege, younger film-maker Brooks Otterlake, played by Peter Bogdanovich.

The hope is also that it will create a spectacle of popularity and success which will impress possible backers, also on the invite list. But the spectacle is of something else: the electricity fails, the lights cut out, the projector packs up, the drunken ill-humour escalates. Also, Hannaford’s being goaded by an obnoxious critic there, Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg), transparently based on Welles’s old enemy, Pauline Kael. Gradually, in all the melee and boozy disorder, an awful thought creeps up: Hannaford’s never getting his production money. This party isn’t a relaunch. It’s a wake.

There are references to Fellini here, with the surreal appearance of dwarves, but the comparison is misleading. The Other Side of the Wind really looks more like an experimental American movie of that time. It resembles The Last Movie by Dennis Hopper (who has a cameo here) or the early, scrappy pictures of Brian De Palma: Hi Mom! and Greetings. It is a vivid snapshot of a turbulent zeitgeist, the ordeal of making a film independently, the agony of feeling oneself obsolete. Watching The Other Side of the Wind, I found myself thinking of the final scene in David Niven’s Hollywood memoir, The Moon’s A Balloon, in which he remembers turning up to a trendy Hollywood party and being harangued by a aggressive hippy-ish guy for being irrelevant, but then told he could atone for his sins by coming up with some “heavy bread” for this man’s new film company. Niven seraphically accepts that his time is up. But Welles is angry: rage and frustration punch holes in this film.

Whatever its flaws, it is an enthralling portrait and a study of work destined always to be in progress.

Since you’re here…

we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our Editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important because it enables us to give a voice to the voiceless, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. It’s what makes us different to so many others in the media, at a time when factual, honest reporting is critical.

But all that’s really required is good conversation and companionship. Oliver doesn’t have to do much more than hang out with Perlman’s charming family, neighbours and friends; swimming, bicycling, lunching, dining, dancing, drinking, sunbathing in various states of alluring undress. The local women admire the beautiful Oliver and so does Perlman’s delicate, moody, highly strung son Elio, played by Timothée Chalamet. There are some heterosexual encounters for them, but these are each just prototypical foreplay for the main event: the hookup between Elio and Oliver.Since this film has come out, a lot has been made critically of Elio and Oliver’s scene with the peach, and that is a sensationally erotic and candid moment, with hints of TS Eliot’s Prufrock, or even Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. But it isn’t why I value the movie, whose moments of passion and yearning are more diffuse, less showy, though no less explicit. Oliver and Elio’s love is exciting and sexy and moving because of the sophistication and emotional intelligence with which it is framed: a physical liaison in which a great deal is a stake, but intriguingly, homophobia as such does not seem to be the major issue or crucial plot point that it would be in almost any other drama. Oliver says that his father would be disgusted, but Elio’s father very much is not, and his understanding and moral wisdom is part of what makes this film such a thing of wonder, particularly in his final speech to Elio, reproduced closely from Aciman’s original book. Intriguingly, Guadagnino has now announced his Linklateresque intention to develop a sequel, based on later parts of the novel, which this film does not touch on.

Call Me By Your Name reminded me of the extravagant passion of early Alan Hollinghurst novels like The Folding Star or The Spell, and I can easily imagine Guadagnino bringing those to the screen. Hammer himself gives an excellent performance: sensitive and authoritative, though perhaps he is rather obviously older than his character’s age, and so the difference in age and worldly knowledge is greater than is theoretically intended in the drama. Stuhlbarg is always such a great performer – a leading player in the Coens’ A Serious Man – but often confined to supporting roles. Yet rarely are they are wonderfully written as this. And Chalamet is piercingly honest as Elio. It is the kind of performance that isn’t just down to actorly technique but openness and emotional purity. It’s an unmissable film.