When it was founded in 1997, Netflix first started as a DVD rental-by-mail service. But it is now one of the largest media streaming services worldwide. After realising the potential of video streaming technology in 2007, the company decided to shift to the video-on-demand subscription model. Since then, the revenue Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour is an intriguing, but misshapen and sometimes bizarre family melodrama. After her father Jim’s (David Thewlis) death, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) reflects on the key traumatic moments of their fraught relationship. Messy, convoluted, tiring: adjectives that describe Veronica’s near 30-year relationship with Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Woody Allen returns with his 49th film, A Rainy Day in New York, as two young lovers decide to spend a couple of days in New York City – although scattered showers are expected. Stephen Sondheim once said that he couldn’t write a bad song. His boast meant that Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Adapted from Colin Niel’s 2017 novel Seules les bêtes, German director Dominik Moll’s Only the Animals is a grippingly-realised mystery-thriller. Centring around the apparent murder of Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and the five people connected by her death, Moll spins a yarn of deceit, ferocious attachment and guilt. Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Set in the titular southern Thai town, the futuristic-sounding date of Krabi, 2562 actually refer to the contemporaneous year in the Buddhist calendar. In filmmakers Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, Krabi, 2562’s title is the first of many nods to time as something subjective, and where futures, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Long before the era of breaking news and 24-hour rolling coverage, when Fox was just a twinkle in Rupert Murdoch’s eye and CNN had yet to unscroll its first Chiron, son of Russian Jewish immigrants Mike Wallace dominated the airwaves and the ratings. Going behind the headlines and losing Continue Reading
Basements are a staple in horror movies. They’re a great way to signal to the audience that something creepy is about to happen, and they’ve been used to incredible effect in horror movies since the beginning. If you’re looking for a great horror movie to watch, here are ten highly-rated Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Slipping under the radar at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, The County was nevertheless a hit with those who sought it out. Released on Curzon Home Cinema this week, this western-tinged, visceral Icelandic drama deserves as large an audience as possible. Despite the obvious Icelandic setting of Grímur Hákonarson’s (Rams) third Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In his follow-up to The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins takes us on a “new road movie through cinema”, a 14-hour virtual film school made up entirely of the all-too-often forgotten links: masterful films directed by women. Please note that this is a review of the complete Continue Reading
One of the greatest things about poker is the drama of the game itself. Just imagine the thrill professional players feel while they play, knowing that a single card could change their lives forever. Knowing how popular poker is and what a huge public it appeals to, many Hollywood directors Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In the years since Juno offered a light-hearted but even-handed take on the subject of unwanted teen pregnancy, the discourse around reproductive rights in America has, if anything, grown more polarised. Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a subtle, quietly devastating look at how a young woman’s body Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s seventh feature (and second out this month in the UK, the other being documentary Infinite Football), is a stylish and fitfully engaging crime thriller with a great concept, let down by incoherent plotting and impenetrable characterisation. Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), a middle-aged cop working for the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A Romanian pen pusher’s attempts to revolutionise the beautiful game goes far beyond inverting the pyramid in Corneliu Porumboiu’s hilarious Infinite Football, a semi-follow-up to The Second Game. The introduction of rules to the game of football gave it a shared language and helped turn it into a spectator Continue Reading
★☆☆☆☆ In her directorial debut Romantic Comedy, British musician and actor Elizabeth Sankey examines the history of one of cinema’s greatest and most enduring genres. Sadly, a love of romantic comedies and a sharp approach to editing are not enough to buoy up this hopelessly shallow documentary. Opening on a Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Camino Skies tracks six pilgrims from New Zealand and Australia as they embark on the historic five hundred mile pilgrimage that winds across Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The gruelling pilgrimage – known in English as the Way of St. James – across the Continue Reading
