Jessica Hausner’s film, which avoids spelling out its obvious subject, focuses on a group of schoolgirls encouraged to live without food
Jessica Hausner is the Austrian director whose elegant, refrigerated style has made her a Cannes favourite and her 2009 film Lourdes, about the ordinary world of miracles, is a 21st-century classic. But her recent move to English-language movies has resulted in some nebulous work in the shape of her 2019 picture Little Joe, and so it has proved again with this exasperating and baffling movie.
Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption. The “trigger warning” at the beginning of the film about these issues is fatuous, whether intended ironically or not. The deadpan mannerisms are glib, the line readings are torpid in the wrong way and the laborious drama leads us round...
Jessica Hausner is the Austrian director whose elegant, refrigerated style has made her a Cannes favourite and her 2009 film Lourdes, about the ordinary world of miracles, is a 21st-century classic. But her recent move to English-language movies has resulted in some nebulous work in the shape of her 2019 picture Little Joe, and so it has proved again with this exasperating and baffling movie.
Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption. The “trigger warning” at the beginning of the film about these issues is fatuous, whether intended ironically or not. The deadpan mannerisms are glib, the line readings are torpid in the wrong way and the laborious drama leads us round...
- 5/22/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Ray And Liz Photo: Courtesy of New York Film Festival
Ray And Liz, 1.45am, Tuesday, Film4
A textbook case of how vital production design can be to creating and sustaining the mood of a movie, Beck Rainford's work on Richard Billingham's film is so intense you can almost smell it. She recreates, alongside Billingham a snapshot of the bleak side of Thatcher's Britain, as he draws on his own childhood and photographic studies of his family to depict a dysfunctional family. Presented as a triptych, we see his alcoholic father Ray (Patrick Romer), in a framing device, elderly and alone after Liz (Deidre Kelly) has left him. The film then flashes back to two more periods in the family's life with the focus falling on Richard's little brother Jason - first seen as a toddler and then as an older child (when he is played by Joshua Millard-Lloyd...
Ray And Liz, 1.45am, Tuesday, Film4
A textbook case of how vital production design can be to creating and sustaining the mood of a movie, Beck Rainford's work on Richard Billingham's film is so intense you can almost smell it. She recreates, alongside Billingham a snapshot of the bleak side of Thatcher's Britain, as he draws on his own childhood and photographic studies of his family to depict a dysfunctional family. Presented as a triptych, we see his alcoholic father Ray (Patrick Romer), in a framing device, elderly and alone after Liz (Deidre Kelly) has left him. The film then flashes back to two more periods in the family's life with the focus falling on Richard's little brother Jason - first seen as a toddler and then as an older child (when he is played by Joshua Millard-Lloyd...
- 1/9/2023
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Turner Prize-nominated artist Richard Billingham turns his hand to filmmaking with an overwhelmingly personal, intricately observed depiction of his troubled upbringing and neglectful parents. This remarkably assured debut feature was born out of Billingham’s single-screen video artwork Ray and his acclaimed 1996 photography book Ray’s a Laugh, which captured his poverty-stricken domestic life with uncompromising honesty. Shot beautifully on 16mm, Ray & Liz proves just as candid and heralds Billingham as a unique cinematic voice.
The narrative unfurls through several vignettes and snapshots of Billingham’s childhood. We begin on an act that frames the other two set pieces – Ray (Patrick Romer) is a bedridden, old man whiling away the reminder of his life by staring out the window of his council flat and getting drunk by 9am on home-brewed beer. We then flashback to the early 80s where a younger Ray (Justin Salinger) and chain smoking Liz (Ella Smith...
The narrative unfurls through several vignettes and snapshots of Billingham’s childhood. We begin on an act that frames the other two set pieces – Ray (Patrick Romer) is a bedridden, old man whiling away the reminder of his life by staring out the window of his council flat and getting drunk by 9am on home-brewed beer. We then flashback to the early 80s where a younger Ray (Justin Salinger) and chain smoking Liz (Ella Smith...
- 3/8/2019
- by Luke Channell
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Art imitates life “Ray & Liz,” the autobiographical debut feature by Turner Prize-nominated artist Richard Billingham; that’s nothing new. But it’s the way art imitates, reflects and recomposes other art — specifically, Billingham’s much-discussed photography — that lends complex layers of memoir and mimesis to this singular spin on the British kitchen-sink drama, preserving both the director’s childhood and his creative evolution in gorgeous, grainy amber. Collating multiple visual and thematic preoccupations from the director’s fine-art oeuvre (notably his bleakly intimate portraiture of his working-class parents) and filtering them through the ingenious compositional eye of d.p. Daniel Landin, “Ray & Liz” is formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force. Commercially, this Locarno competition entry is an uncompromisingly hard sell, though festival bookings will come thick and fast.
Familiarity with Billingham’s photographic output is by no means vital to an appreciation of “Ray & Liz,...
Familiarity with Billingham’s photographic output is by no means vital to an appreciation of “Ray & Liz,...
- 8/7/2018
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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