Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t exactly known for emotional subjectivity and visual bombast, so when a young raver tripping out in a field sees an animated bird swooping through the sky in her latest film, Eden (2014), it potentially […]
★★★★★ No cinematic genre can capture the inky morality of pernicious scavengers feeding on the carcass of post-war Europe like film noir. And no other noir manages it with quite the pervasive world-weariness and melancholy of The Third Man (1949). Beautifully […]
★★★★☆ The fifth feature from worryingly prolific mid-twenties Quebecoise filmmaker Xavier Dolan, Mommy (2014) sees him returning to the themes that have fuelled his impressive quartet of features thus far, only here they are so tightly woven together to form […]
★★☆☆☆ Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 3: (Final Sequence) represents something of a challenge to the star-ratings system. Give it one star or give it five. Heck, give it none! The most notorious film series in recent memory is bulletproof […]
★★★☆☆ Michael Winterbottom’s latest feature, The Face of an Angel (2014), explores the intersection of beauty, youth, sex and violent crime. Inspired by Amanda Knox’s alleged murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy, Winterbottom offers a perceptive, but at […]
★★☆☆☆ With The Gunman (2015), Sean Penn becomes the latest inductee into that club slowly being filled by older gentlemen with a particular set of skills. Pierre Morel was a key figure in the meteoric rise of the ‘geriaction’ genre […]
★★★★☆ “Everyone should see these images to see how terrible out species is,” says Brazilian photography Sebastião Salgado as he reviews the photographs that he has taken throughout his career. It has been a career that has been inspired by […]
★★★☆☆ “If it’s gonna kill me, I don’t want it to bore me.” It’s an apparently novel way to approach a diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, but is precisely the one adopted by Wilko Johnson. Most famous for being the […]
★★★★☆ Starring Paul Rudd as the diminutive hero, Ant-Man (2015) is a hilarious heist movie cum superhero flick that proves to be a hugely enjoyable and playful way to bring the studios ‘Phase Two’ to a close. It revels in oddity; […]
★★★☆☆ The problem with Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 13 Minutes (2015) is ultimately the weight of history. Where the knowledge of what is to transpire elevates every scene of his monumental Oscar-winning portrayal of Hitler’s final days, Downfall (2004), in this tale […]
★★★☆☆ The evolution of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon has acclimatised modern audiences to notion of tittering at the eccentricities of people on the autistic spectrum. Generalities blind audiences to the fact that people on that spectrum are very much […]
“Earl Grey is my favourite tea,” says Marjane Satrapi as she stuffs a handful of teabags into a large Thermos sat on the table before her. We’re sat in a London hotel room to chat about her new film, the […]