Movie Reviews

No monsters under the bed in ‘Saint Maud,” but many in trenches the of her own mind

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The pious British poet and artist William Blake once famously referred to organized religion as an “ugly distortion of a true spiritual life.” The more humankind attempts to put measures, limits, and analogues on the divine, the farther we got away from the undistilled truth of the unknowable.

by Piers Marchant 

The pious British poet and artist William Blake once famously referred to organized religion as an “ugly distortion of a true spiritual life.” The more humankind attempts to put measures, limits, and analogues on the divine, the farther we got away from the undistilled truth of the unknowable.

We are humans, we don’t so much like to truck with feelings alone, they are too intangible, resistant to description and predictability. It makes us uncomfortable to float in that pool of undefined spirituality, so we work feverishly hard to write scriptures and edicts of God’s word, and make symbols out of all the things we can’t possibly touch.

Blake’s courageous brand of self-attenuated spirituality seeps in throughout “Saint Maud,” Rose Glass’ commanding feature debut, about a young woman who believes she has found her divine path after a lifetime of feeling lost, and couldn’t be farther off the mark.

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Why biopics go so wrong

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Johnny Flynn
Johnny Flynn as David Bowie

Stardust, a new movie about a young David Bowie, has been widely mocked. It’s just the latest example of a real-life icon making for a disastrous film subject, writes Nicholas Barber.

By Nicholas Barber

Released in 2018, the hit Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody had its producers singing We Are the Champions: it won four Oscars and took close to $1bn at the box office. The following year, Rocketman, a musical based on the life of Elton John, did well, too, making enough money to keep Sir Elton in designer specs for decades, and nabbing two Oscars of its own. And now Stardust, featuring Johnny Flynn as a young David Bowie, thus completing a trilogy of dramas about exotically stage-named, sexually adventurous British glam-rock legends. The film is released in the UK today, so presumably its producers are just waiting for the trophies and the profits to roll in.

Or maybe not. There is no doubting the sincerity of its Bowie-phile cast and crew, but unlike Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, Stardust is a low-budget indie movie with some unavoidable flaws. The director made the curious decision to cast actors in their thirties, forties and even fifties as people who were in their twenties at the time. And because Stardust wasn’t approved by the late singer’s estate, it has to do without any of his songs.

Unsurprisingly, the trailer was mocked on social media when it was unveiled in October, and, when the film came out in the US in November, the AV Club’s critic dismissed it as ”a junky biographical drama that doesn’t feature any music by Bowie or his contemporaries and stars a guy who doesn’t look or sound anything like the man”. That was one of the more enthusiastic reviews.

The risks involved

The lesson is that the celebrity biopic is the most high-risk of genres. When it goes well, it fills cinemas and wins awards, especially in the 21st Century. But

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