Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ “I want to marry a lighthouse keeper. / And live by the side of the sea.” sang Erika Eigan, but according to The Light Between Oceans, the new film from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, the advice would be: don’t. Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, a veteran back from the First World War […]
★★★☆☆ Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature, Things to Come, is an introspective exploration of a woman losing her moorings and facing up to old age. Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie, a high school philosophy teacher. When Heinz (André Marcon), her husband of twenty-five years, also a philosophy lecturer, admits he has met someone else, she […]
★★★☆☆ Equity claims to be the first film about Wall Street from a female perspective, and it certainly delivers on that promise by putting women – and the specific challenges they face in finance – front and centre. These include answering business calls while undergoing ultrasound, fending off the sexual advances of a […]
★★★☆☆ Picked up by Amazon Studios following its world premiere at Cannes, Woody Allen’s new comedy Café Society is a polished, amber-coloured sonnet to the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1930s. Jesse Eisenberg plays Bobby, a young New Yorker who tired of his father’s jewellery business goes West to find his fortune by […]
★★★☆☆ Perhaps the most uniquely disheartening cinema-going experience is when you enjoy the film you’ve watched (there’s a good story, a good cast and so forth), but you can see all the exciting directions it could have explored, yet failed to pursue. Such is the case with the enticingly titled The 9th Life […]
★★★★☆ Like an episode of The Twilight Zone guest-directed by Luis Buñuel, The Similars is richly absurd in premise but also founded on a bedrock of social and political issues. One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the same year in which the film is set, where the army killed […]
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s striking debut Shelley is a Gothic horror that uses degeneration of the body to explore the exploitation of migrant workers and the individualist ideology that accompanies society’s growing obsession with ‘organic’ living. A young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan), arrives in the Danish countryside to work as a housekeeper for […]
★★★☆☆ On the colour wheel, Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas is more Bob Clark’s Black Christmas than Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas. While it’s tempting to bring them together as a Yuletide triptych, a ‘Three Colours Christmas’ triple-bill (Krzysztof Kieślowski missed a trick with that one), Anderson’s comic slasher doesn’t quite earn its wings as […]
★★★★☆ Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is a movie aesthetes of kitsch will embrace with open arms. Not that the film’s distinct look is mere window-dressing or getting by on camp charm alone. A political work of true authorship if ever there was one, Biller not only directed, she wrote the screenplay, she’s […]
★★★★☆ Revenge is a dish best served over several courses in Sean Brosnan’s brutal redneck noir tale My Father, Die. Full of Old Testament values and punishing degradation, it pits a father and son against each other in skirmishes that go well beyond traditional family rows into the realm of pure Freudian nightmare. […]
★★★★☆ Ghosts from Our Past: Both Figuratively and Literally, the title of a controversial book co-authored by Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Abbey Yates (Melissa McCarthy), in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, serves as a handy description of Carson Mell’s superb horror comedy, Another Evil. Vacationing at his mountain cabin property, Dan (an abstract painter) […]
★★★☆☆ Home is where the Abattoir is, in Darren Lynn Bousman’s film noir chiller. Swapping torture porn frolics – he helmed several sequels in the Saw franchise – for a more subdued approach, his latest work, arguably his strongest yet, is pitched as a ghost story with a nightmare twist. Based on an […]
FrightFest 2016, the UK’s premier horror film festival, runs over the forthcoming August Bank Holiday weekend. With over sixty movies set to screen, plus their short films showcase, Andy Nyman’s very popular quiz and several industry-related talks and events, FrightFest continues to expand its brand and deliver a varied selection of titles from […]
★★☆☆☆ Raucous entertainment and early promise inevitably succumbs to drab predictability in Todd Phillips’ War Dogs. Based on the true story of David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), two twentysomething friends who bluffed their way into a multi-million dollar Pentagon contract and were subsequently arrested by the FBI, here we […]
★★☆☆☆ The New Founding Fathers of America have decreed that every year on 12 March for the space of twelve hours all criminal law will be suspended. If you want to attack someone you can, assault and murder are not only permitted but encouraged as a way of collectively purging the populace of […]
★★☆☆☆ Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of those films where you can hear the pitch while you’re watching the movie. “It’ll be This is Spinal Tap for the millennials, for the Beliebers,” is probably how it went. And the prospects were good. It’s a comedy from the team who brought you […]
★★★★☆ Few contemporary filmmakers are able to use colour with such painterly, masterful splendour as Pedro Almodóvar. The opening frame of Julieta is a vivid close up of the folds of a scarlet dress, billowing ever so slowly. Visually alluring, their movement resembles that of a heart, rhythmically expanding and contracting. The great […]
★★★☆☆ Coming out of the punk explosion of the 1970s, Gary Numan had a series of hits such as Are “Friends” Electric? and Cars, which saw him hit international fame, quickly become a millionaire and inspire a devoted following. Critically lambasted, he did himself no favours supporting Maggie Thatcher and giving interviews about […]