Venice 2014: ‘The Last Hammer Blow’ review
★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing...
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★★★★★ Greek weird wave director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) hits his stride with his strangest yet most deeply satisfying comedy fable yet, Poor Things. This exhilarating mix of Fanny Hill and Frankenstein is adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name.
★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing...
★★★☆☆ Adapted from crime author Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, Daniel Schechter’s Life of Crime (2013) is a polyester clad, bell-bottom sporting time capsule...
★★☆☆☆ Lasse Hallström revisits familiar territory with The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), a warmly lit but cloyingly corny and drama-free adaptation of Richard C. Morais’...
★★★★☆ Rightly selected as the opening salvo of this year’s well-attended 15th Film4 FrightFest in London, fervently followed American genre director Adam Wingard’s The...
★★★☆☆ The documentary deluge in which we are still mired is so often lazily acknowledged as “a positive thing”. Our collective, unblinking admiration for...
★☆☆☆☆ Best summarised as a watered down Memento (2000) aimed firmly at the Richard and Judy’s Book Club crowd and based on the hugely...