Film Review: Urban Hymn
★★★★☆ Debuting at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, British crime drama Urban Hymn is an impressively rounded character study set against the London riots...
★★★☆☆ Set 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens were making incursions into the lands of the Neanderthals, Andrew Cumming’s horror thriller The Origin depicts a small tribe coming up against a malefic entity in unknown and inhospitable environs.
★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ A man sits alone in a room with a notepad and begins to scribble down his own voiceover. He only writes on one page and seems to always be starting at the top. His thoughts will be meticulous and he will show a certain expertise. When he’s finished writing he will place the pen on the table, neatly aligned with the pad.
★★★★☆ Debuting at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, British crime drama Urban Hymn is an impressively rounded character study set against the London riots...
★★★★★ Director Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow uses the haunted house setup and classical filmmaking techniques expressly for political purposes. Former radical leftist Shedih...
★★★☆☆ How far can a fart joke get you? That’s the question posed by Sundance offering Swiss Army Man. The answer is surprisingly far,...
★★★☆☆ Southside with You is the film equivalent of a comfortable pair of familiar shoes, the feeling of sitting down into a cosy chair,...
★★★☆☆ Much has been made of the prominence of a ‘white saviour’ in biographical historical epic Free State of Jones. Is this a film...
★☆☆☆☆ At first glance The Fencer has a lot going for it. Set in Soviet occupied Estonia, it is the oddball tale – partly...
★★★☆☆ “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you.” Delivered by the principal subject of Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn’s Netflix...
★★★★☆ It’s hardly surprising that the wit of Jane Austen’s writing is often overlooked when it’s transposed onto the screen. It’s not so much...
★★★★★ Hollywood producer Val Lewton was known for taking B-grade movie concepts handed to him by studio executives and elevating them to become more...
★★★☆☆ While Juan Piqeur Simón’s 1988 infestation horror Slugs can hardly stand up to the broad appeal of the similarly-themed Arachnophobia, Critters or Tremors,...