This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I’m not generally a fan of slow cinema. Long scenes where the plot lingers undeveloped whilst the director shows us a shot they’re mysteriously proud of do very little for me. Standing still feels like the antithesis of what moving pictures are supposed to do.
So I approached La Grazia with anxiety. Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, it tells the story of the final six months in office of a fictional Italian president, Mariano De Santis. The role is a largely ceremonial one, and this particular president, we learn, is famous for not doing anything.
This has, indeed, been his strength, waiting for others to act instead. As a political approach, it can have merits. As a subject for a film, it didn’t sound promising.
The film is over two hours, and quite a lot of it is indeed taken up with the president, played with considerable charm by Toni Servillo, staring thoughtfully into various distances. Occasionally his daughter, devoted to him but increasingly impatient, will try to persuade him to take a decision, and Servillo will sigh sadly and resume staring.
De Santis is weighed down by the death of his wife, and tortured by the conviction that she’d had an affair with one of his oldest friends. Can he forgive? Should he take political revenge on the friend? Meanwhile he has choices to make: should he sign a bill introducing euthanasia, and should he pardon two convicted murderers?
But ultimately, the stately pacing won me over, giving the story time to settle. De Santis’s dilemmas feel real. The film is one to be savoured slowly, like a fine Tuscan wine.
Dead Man’s Wire is the opposite of slow cinema. It opens at speed and director Gus Van Sant keeps his foot on the floor all the way to the end. It tells the true story of Tony Kiritsis, a wannabe property developer who in 1977 took revenge on the Indianapolis mortgage company he believed had swindled him by kidnapping Richard Hall, a broker at the firm and the son of the owner, at the end of a shotgun.
The title comes from the innovative way Kirtsis ensured the police didn’t shoot him, wrapping a wire round Hall’s neck that would set off the weapon if he pulled away or if Kirtsis fell backwards.
This allowed the pair to make their way down the street, accompanied by nervous police, and eventually back to Kirtsis’s apartment, where a stand-off ensued, as a furious Kirtsis demanded money and an apology, whilst the bemused cops tried to work out what to do.
The centre of the film is the relationship between Kiritsis and Hall, involving fine performances from Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery. But around them swirl a rich cast of supporting characters: Colman Domingo plays an ultra-smooth radio host who’s called up by Kirtsis when he wants to unburden himself. Cary Elwes is a detective who knows Kirtsis and who fears he will have to kill him. Myha’la is a cub reporter who spots a career-making story.
The film is shot with a distinct 1970s aesthetic: the graininess, the colour grading, the feel of the way the camera focuses, as though Van Sant had found an “Alan J Pakula” filter in the editing suite. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a lost classic that had been sitting in a Hollywood basement for the last 50 years.
The decade that style forgot seems to be enjoying something of a moment: we’re about to get a 4K restoration of All the President’s Men, a disc whose arrival is more hotly anticipated in my house than Christmas Day. Dead Man’s Wire, with its dark comedy and likeable, hapless characters, evokes Dog Day Afternoon. It’s an echo that’s played up by the casting of Al Pacino — the hostage taker in the 1975 film — as Hall’s father, who seems significantly more concerned with protecting his business than his son.
It is, all in all, a great piece of cinema. Which is interesting because the Internet Movie Database lists no fewer than 104 producers — the press notes for the film get that down to a more manageable 77. This is usually a sign of disaster, but in this case, they got away with it.
Similarly fast-paced is 1962’s Strongroom, a B-movie that has been restored and re-released in cinemas and online by the British Film Institute.
Derren Nesbitt — probably best known as a Nazi in Where Eagles Dare — leads a team of robbers who, after pulling off a job, realise that the vault in which they locked a suburban bank manager and his secretary is airtight. If they don’t do something, the gang will face a murder charge.
It’s a great set-up and the result is completely gripping, cutting between the robbers, the pair in the vault, and the police, slowly working out what has happened.
Just 80 minutes long, it holds you to the final frame.
Finally, a cinema spin-off. I’ll Be Back is a one-woman stage show at The Glitch, Waterloo, riffing off the Terminator films and suggesting the AI which wipes out humanity was built by a West Midlands woman lonely after the disappearance of her brother. Justine Malone, star and creator, does a wonderful job of moving the story from LA to Dudley, playing a cast that includes the bored staff of a post-apocalyptic office and a Terminator running Windows 95. I laughed all the way through.
