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. […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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, […]