Interview: Rachel Tunnard & Jodie Whittaker
Writer-director Rachel Tunnard and leading lady-executive producer Jodie Whittaker are a bubbly pair. Sparky personalities and the closeness of their long-term friendship imbues kooky...
★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
Writer-director Rachel Tunnard and leading lady-executive producer Jodie Whittaker are a bubbly pair. Sparky personalities and the closeness of their long-term friendship imbues kooky...
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour...
★★☆☆☆ It’s been twenty years since the aliens invaded Earth in Roland Emmerich’s epochal Independence Day, and now they’re back to fulfil their world-destroying...
★★☆☆☆ European middleweights Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl and Michael Nygvist form a strong foundation on which to build a semi-political historical thriller. Though Florian...
★★★☆☆ It’s incredible to think that Absolutely Fabulous, the popular sitcom starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, ran from 1992-2012. Some twenty-five years after...
★★★☆☆ Coming hot on the heels of his Palme d’Or triumph I, Daniel Blake, Louise Osmond’s biographical documentary of Ken Loach Versus: The Life...
★★☆☆☆ Triple 9 is nothing if not muddled. Toplined by an all-star cast including Kate Winslet and Woody Harrelson, John Hillcoat’s latest is a...
★★★★★ ‘There never was a woman like Gilda‘, proclaimed the poster for Charles Vidor’s classic 1946 film noir, and indeed, the mark that Rita...
★☆☆☆☆ Don’t shoot the messenger. But the word on the wire at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where Meg Ryan’s Ithaca is making its UK...
★★★☆☆ Its title may refer to an undeniably physical barrier but Tadhg O’Sullivan’s The Great Wall, the opening film at this year’s Open City...