Film Review: Free Fire
★★★☆☆ A field. A tower block. And now a disused warehouse. Over his last three films, Ben Wheatley has been perfecting the knack of a […]
Film Review: Tickling Giants
★★★★☆ The timing could not have been better for Sara Taksler’s new documentary Tickling Giants. Or worse if you think about it. Hosni Mubarak has […]
Film Review: Graduation
★★★★★ The Romania of director Cristian Mungiu’s terse, difficult Graduation is one weighed down by endemic corruption, systemic unfairness and economic defeat. Romeo (Adrian Titieni) […]
Film Review: Fear Eats the Soul
★★★★★ It’s surely the sheer, unvarnished humanity on display in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s celebrated Ali: Fear Eats the Soul that’s the film’s greatest success. When […]
Film Review: The Autopsy of Jane Doe
★★★☆☆ André Øvredal burst onto the scene with the irresistibly enjoyable Trollhunter in 2010, a mockumentary road trip humorously poking around under Norway’s less-travelled bridges […]
DVD Review: Pieces
★★★☆☆ The audacious tagline for Pieces‘ grisly poster – “It’s exactly what you think it is” – isn’t kidding: Juan Piquer Simon’s 1982 splatterfest is […]
Criterion Review: Lone Wolf and Cub
★★★★☆ Adapted from the long-running successful Manga series, the Lone Wolf and Cub films represent the very best in the chanbara genre. This Criterion set […]
Film Review: The Lost City of Z
★★★★☆ There aren’t many directors working today with the same ambition and exquisite craftsmanship of James Gray. Despite being renowned for his complex, emotional storytelling, […]
Film Review: The Eyes of My Mother
★★★★★ It’s exceedingly rare for a filmmaker to present a deeply disturbed individual on the big screen, one who partakes in all sorts of grotesqueness, […]
Film Review: Aquarius
★★★★☆ Kleber Mendonça Filho’s debut feature Neighbouring Sounds was a taut social thriller about the paranoia of Brazil’s urban middle-class. One of the results of […]
Film Review: The Age of Shadows
★★★★☆ “People shouldn’t live among rats.” So says resistance fighter Jang-ok (Park Hee-soon) at the climax of a blistering, terrifically choreographed prologue in Kim Jee-woon’s […]
Criterion Review: Multiple Maniacs
★★★☆☆ Depravity and bad taste are the watchwords of director John Waters’ unique oeuvre, none more so than his unhinged 1970 effort Multiple Maniacs – […]
DVD Review: Property Is No Longer a Theft
★★★★☆ How is the ownership of one object assigned to one person or another, and what does the nature of ownership say about the owner? […]
Ten live-action films Brits want to see animated
With the much-anticipated, Emma Watson-starring Beauty and the Beast in cinemas this week, live-action remakes are a hot topic. After the success of The Jungle […]
Kinoteka 2017: Afterimage
★★★☆☆ They say never meet your idols, and it might also be advisable not to make films about them but Andrzej Wajda always defied such […]
Film Review: The Olive Tree
★★☆☆☆ Icíar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree is a familial drama whose meandering tone and rather glib message mean that it never truly takes root. Set […]
Film Review: Get Out
★★★★☆ Relatively cheap and quick to shoot, horror is often the favoured genre of young directors. Luminaries like Sam Raimi and Steven Spielberg both famously […]
Film Review: The Salesman
★★★★☆ In his 2012 film A Separation, Asghar Farhadi created a gripping and deeply affecting study of how a family unit can disintegrate within Iran’s […]