★★☆☆☆ “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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the same year in […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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), […]
★★★★☆ 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, […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
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 […]
★★☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★☆☆☆ 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. […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
