Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ Philip is a self-professed king, ordained directly by God and living with a harem of wives on a horse farm in Sussex. Laura-Anne is a ten-year-old girl searching for love in the windswept two-street town of Siddick in Cumbria. […]
★★★☆☆ Two decades after cult hit Trainspotting tapped into the zeitgeist of the 1990s its sequel – the oddly titled T2 – reaches screens, propelled by an overbearing sense of nostalgia. Not only does the film’s narrative bear a striking […]
★★☆☆☆ A highly contrived script, weak performances across the board and aimless direction make The White King a remarkably dull, at times laughable Orwellian tale. Set in a dystopian nation very originally named The Homeland, located somewhere in the past, […]
★★★☆☆ Have you ever wanted to see an elephant overcome stage fright and belt out Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing by Stevie Wonder to adoring fans? Or hear a gorilla tinkle the ivories to Elton John’s I’m Still Standing? […]
★★★☆☆ No one would mistake Mel Gibson for the embodiment of subtlety. From his blood-soaked Scottish romp Braveheart to his blood-soaked The Passion of the Christ, Gibson has always made his films with sledgehammer blows, a simplistic moral universe and […]
★★★☆☆ Mick Jackson’s courtroom drama Denial focuses on the 1996 British libel suit brought by David Irving (Timothy Spall), the infamous Holocaust denier, against American historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her publisher Penguin Books. Based on Lipstadt’s book Denial: […]
★★★★★ “She sees everything but is totally blind,” says Jacques Derrida crossing a New York City street as Kirsten Johnson tracks him with her camera walking backwards, half stumbling in the process. The French philosopher thinks himself frightfully clever with […]
★★★★☆ Part romance-revenge story, part cautionary fable, E.A. Dupont’s Varieté is a sophisticated melodrama with a unique setting and gorgeous imagery courtesy of Karl Freund, master cinematographer of Metropolis and Dracula. Newly released as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema […]
★★☆☆☆ Director Charles Burnett made perhaps one of the greatest cinematic accounts of marginalised black lives with his 1978 classic Killer of Sheep – a film which was offered a thoroughly deserving retrospective and re-release by the BFI a few […]
★★★★★ Heralded by Pedro Almodóvar as “one of the best in Spanish cinema history”, Victor Erice’s El Sur is re-released on DVD and Blu-ray courtesy of the BFI. Best known for his spellbinding debut Spirit of the Beehive, Erice’s follow-up […]
★★☆☆☆ The unnerving neighbour is a shopworn trope of domestic thrillers and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy is only an occasionally effective entry into the genre. Following a face-off with a psychopath that almost costs him his life, Detective Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) […]
★★★☆☆ Lion, the debut feature from Australian director Garth Davis, is the tale of a tiny needle in a very large haystack and perseverance against all odds. By turns tragic, deeply moving and heartfelt, it tells the remarkable true story […]