Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. “The name of a man,” he asserts, “is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.” Its deployment in this […]
★★★★☆ The Weltanschauung of New York’s upper-middle intelligentsia is almost custom built for a good run- a-round comedy of manners. Rebecca Miller’s latest film, Maggie’s Plan, is one more addition to a considerable canon of light, loving satire that laughs […]
★★★★☆ A Poem is a Naked Person is pretty far out, man. In the very loosest sense of the term a documentary biopic of Oklahoma musician Leon Russell, Les Blank’s long-lost film orbits the hirsute, enigmatic singer-songwriter onstage, in the […]
★★★★★ It’s hard to find the words to adequately describe the breathtaking magnitude and harrowing brilliance of Son of Saul. More than seventy years have passed since the liberation of the death camps but in that time cinema has struggled […]
★★★☆☆ When discovering or revisiting the early output of an admired filmmaker, you always hope that they’ll shed new light on their more familiar films. We long to find rough-hewn progenitors with identifiable threads of narrative, theme, and style that […]
★★☆☆☆ Sacha Baron Cohen has found fame and notoriety playing out our collective prejudices in living, breathing form, in order to make us realise how untenable they are. Borat’s social satire worked because of its mockumentary form; even as Baron […]