Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ “The Mozart of chess” isn’t the most hip of nicknames but it goes some way to expressing the inexplicable, impossible genius of Magnus Carlsen. The 25-year-old Norwegian Grandmaster is the focus of Benjamin Ree’s Magnus, an intimate documentary that […]
★★★☆☆ Cast your mind back to a time when Steve Martin assumed the mantle of comedic king of the box office, sharing the title with the likes of Chevy Chase, John Candy and Eddie Murphy. Amongst the more inherently zany, […]
★★★★★ On first viewing, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love stands as an outlier against Paul Thomas Anderson’s other more seriously-minded work, starring, as it does, Adam Sandler as the lead in a quirky romantic comedy. But on closer inspection, Anderson’s trademark themes […]
★★★★☆ An enormous film deserves an enormous preservation effort. Film historian Kevin Brownlow spent more than thirty years tracking down film sources across the world to make up the five-and-a-half hour cut of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, completed with the BFI […]
★★★★☆ Acclaimed director of 2013’s The Greatful Dead, Eiji Uchida returns with Lowlife Life, an often hilarious, charming and fitfully uncomfortable look into the world of low-budget Japanese filmmaking. Indie director Tetsuo (Kyohiko Shibukawa) is an initially charming Linklater-esque slacker, […]
★★★★★ Rarely in cinema has the raw personal and symbolic power of dreaming been so effectively captured as in the Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 feature Dreams. A series of vignettes connected through theme and mood rather than narrative, Kurosawa’s late film […]
★★★★☆ Tomasz Wasilewski’s United States of Love may take place just after 1989’s felling of the Berlin Wall but little of the era’s euphoric optimism transfers to the Polish writer-director’s dispassionate yet engrossing third feature. Broken down into loosely formed […]
★★★☆☆ In a city of millions, it isn’t right but it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. Lost in an ocean of lives lived from 9 to 5, spent peering into mobile phone screens, behind […]
★★★★☆ Early on in I, Olga Hepnarová the eponymous mass-murderer (played with rangy inscrutability by Machalina Olszanska) refers to a passage from Graeme Greene’s The Quiet American. It’s the famous underlying message of the novel which claims that it’s impossible […]
★★★☆☆ James Newell Osterberg Jr. is better known as Iggy Pop, inventor of the stage dive, proto-punk jester and the lead singer of The Stooges. Sitting down with cult New York film director Jim Jarmusch, Pop, alongside his erstwhile bandmates, […]
★★★★☆ Five years on from the final instalment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we return to the Wizarding World for an enchanting tale of magical mayhem with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. There is no Radcliffe […]
★★☆☆☆ There is an alternate universe in which Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog – a brazenly disreputable and vicious crime caper – is a high watermark of postmodern American genre cinema. The veteran director has confessed that the film is […]