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 British indie Adult Life Skills with a warmth, familiarity and humour. The film – now playing in cinemas UK-wide – made its European premiere at this Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour of trying to understand what it is like to be without sight. But cinema is memory and in the case of someone who has lost their Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 ambitions in its belated follow-up, Independence Day: Resurgence. While humanity has spent two decades preparing for the second invasion, nothing could have prepared audiences for this Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ European middleweights Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl and Michael Nygvist form a strong foundation on which to build a semi-political historical thriller. Though Florian Gallenberger’s The Colony aims for the likes of Munich and Argo, it falls some distance short, an early warning sign coming in the form of an Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 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 the TV pilot, the pair are back, this time on the big screen; older but no wiser. Given the current malaise settling on Britain, the timing Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 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 and Films of Ken Loach couldn’t have been more timely and it is a fitting if suitably modest and workmanlike survey of the radical left wing Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ 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 messy and unsophisticated cop drama that quickly stumbles into a spiritless slumber. Michael (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his crack band of crooked cops and ex-military professionals – Continue Reading
★★★★★ ‘There never was a woman like Gilda‘, proclaimed the poster for Charles Vidor’s classic 1946 film noir, and indeed, the mark that Rita Hayworth’s character left on cinema is indelible. The woman who once sent the inmates of Shawshank State Penitentiary wild with desire has undeniable erotic appeal, but Continue Reading
★☆☆☆☆ 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 premiere, doesn’t bode well for the actor’s directorial debut. Set in the titular city post-Pearl Harbour, it’s the story of a teenage boy who delivers telegrams Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 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 Docs Festival in London, opts for a more transmutable definition of no more permeable boundaries. Kafka’s short story The Building of the Great Wall of China Continue Reading
★★★★☆ “No body, no crime,” reads a note taken during a meeting involving Slobodan Milošević presented during Ognjen Glavonić’s Depth Two. It’s haunting not purely because of the powerful lingering effect of a statement of this kind, which refers to the secret ethnic cleansing of citizens of Albanian descent during Continue Reading
2016 has already been a real delight for the documentary connoisseur in the UK. The end of April saw the inaugural edition of the Frames of Representation festival which concentrates on films navigating the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction and art. Next was the UK’s premier doc event, Sheffield Doc/Fest, showcasing Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Untangling the web of politics, sex, drugs and power that weave together crime families is a massive undertaking within film. Much like political dramas, we’ve been met with a myriad of crime family-related films over the years that try to suss out the nature of good and evil in Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Can memories be trusted to document the past? Visual artist Omar Fast’s ambitious debut Remainder, an adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s eponymous novel questions the limitations of art as a tool to interpret history. Combining the devious logic of its source material with a stand-out performance by Tom Sturridge, Remainder Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Although Lorene Scafaria’s tender, bittersweet comedy The Meddler, starring Susan Sarandon and J.K. Simmons, is marred by the occasional cliché, it’s also an unexpectedly perceptive film about loneliness, grief and mother-daughter relationships. After the death of her beloved husband, Joe, Marnie Minervini (Sarandon) moves to Los Angeles to be Continue Reading