★★★☆☆ Ryan Reynolds deserves at least some credit for the patchwork of roles he’s picked recently. There’s the countless rom-coms, his superhero duds, acting work with Atom Egoyan and Rodrigo Cortés, but there are also curiosities like The Voices (2014). […]
★★★★☆ The dead-eyed cast of Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) would appear just as home on the streets of London as Gothenburg, or any other city experiencing the dreary decline of late capitalism. […]
★★★☆☆ Xavier Dolan proves once again that the world revolves around him (and that’s a good thing) in the quiet Canadian drama Elephant Song (2014). The wunderkind is once again the secret spice that brings the best bout of other […]
★★★☆☆ With a hip-hop, cyberpunk aesthetic paying homage to 1980s classics Short Circuit (1986) and RoboCop (1987), by way of the critically derided Tank Girl (1995), Neill Blomkamp’s unorthodox sci-fi Chappie (2015) is an energetic, experimental genre piece that just falls […]
★★★★☆ When Bob Dylan released his thirtieth studio album in 1997, critics claimed that the ominous atmosphere created by producer Daniel Lanois was palpable, but also almost drowned the singer’s vocals. It’s interesting then that New York-based director Oren Moverman […]
★★★☆☆ German director Dietrich Brüggemann took the arthouse world by storm last year with his fourth feature, Stations of the Cross (2014) – a restrained, rigorously formalist study of religious fanaticism in present-day Germany realised in fourteen still frames. Brüggemann’s […]
★★★★★ Touch of Evil (1958) proceeds with one of the most celebrated long-takes in screen history. The sequence is a marvel of technical virtuosity and staged action. From the very start, Orson Welles’s grubby and sweaty noir classic has us […]
★★★★☆ Taking the step up from producer to director, with Love & Mercy (2014) Bill Pohlad successfully delivers a biopic like no other – a tale of endurance based on the turbulent life of Beach Boys member and solo artist […]
★★★★☆ A scathing symposium on the fallacy of a ‘post-racial’ America, Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014) aims to expose the myth that ‘racism is over’. At a time when the conversation concerning racism is roaring louder than ever, Simien’s […]
★★★☆☆ With the continuous addition of films to the coming-of-age canon, it can often feel as though there is a dearth of originality. What is offered up by The Choir (2014) has a promising set-up that allows a window to […]
★★☆☆☆ A loose remake of the 1973 José Giovanni film of the same name, Rachid Bouchareb’s Two Men in Town (2014) transplants the original’s critique of the French judicial system to New Mexico. Starring Forest Whitaker as a Muslim ex-con […]
★★★★☆ Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a linguist, someone who has made language acquisition her life’s work; she has literally written the book on the subject. She lives in New York with her busy doctor husband John (Alec Baldwin), […]
