Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air could have been a stellar documentary given its subject. Alas, it’s not. The film’s principle voice – and limited success – lies with the eminently watchable, animal-loving Antoine Yates, who, […]
★★☆☆☆ A documentary fronted by George Galloway, who narrates The Killing$ of Tony Blair as if he’s recounting a horror story around a campfire, must be taken with a grain of salt. A bitter Labour party reject, who has his […]
★★★☆☆ Steven Spielberg returns to cinema screens this week with an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book The BFG, and the film is an old-fashioned children’s movie of sorts. Forget Pixar’s mutton dressed as lamb: The BFG eschews any […]
Six men, a captain and two chefs on a boat. A competition of points both positive and negative on each and every aspect of their being and conduct. The winner crowned ‘The Best in General’. With Chevalier, Greek director Athina […]
★★★★☆ Can time heal all wounds, or are certain indiscretions immune to the sympathetic ebb and flow of life? That’s the quandary posed in Illegitimate, the eye-catching incest drama from Romanian director Adrian Sitaru. Despite tackling one of society’s last […]
★★★★☆ If there was an award for best newcomer in world cinema then Georgia would be a great outside bet. In recent years, films like Rusudan Chkonia’s Keep Smiling, Levan Koguashvili’s Blind Dates and Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’ In […]
★★★☆☆ The fear of dying is the impetus behind Xavier Seron’s Death by Death, an Oedipal dramedy that positions itself between the two known truths of life and death. A bold and electrifying study of the dysfunctional relationship between a […]
★★☆☆☆ First-time filmmaker Jamie M. Dagg directs Rossif Sutherland in this Canadian crime-thriller as American volunteer and doctor John Lake, whose residency at a Laos hospital is cut short after disobeying his superior. He later encounters a sexual assault on a local beach […]
★★★☆☆ During one of A Patch of Fog‘s increasingly sinister exchanges between unhinged cat and desperate mouse, Stephen Graham’s devilishly dubious security guard, Robert, threatens his quarry with disconcerting rhetoric: “Am I a sad little man?” Though voiced by a […]
★★☆☆☆ Summertime is a well-made, well-acted French art-house flick that unfortunately doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Veteran director Catherine Corsini’s new film starts off as a promising and energising political thriller about the nascent feminist movement in post-1968 Paris, […]
★☆☆☆☆ During the end titles of Precious Cargo we get a close up of some dog muck. It would be nice to think this was a bit of meta-humour or a moment of candid self-awareness from first time director Max […]
★★★★☆ To open his new documentary The Hard Stop, George Amponsah uses a Martin Luther King quote that acts almost as a catalyst for what follows: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s with a view to providing […]