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...
★★★☆☆ 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.
★★★☆☆ A field. A tower block. And now a disused warehouse. Over his last three films, Ben Wheatley has been perfecting the knack of...
★★★★☆ The timing could not have been better for Sara Taksler’s new documentary Tickling Giants. Or worse if you think about it. Hosni Mubarak...
★★★★★ The Romania of director Cristian Mungiu’s terse, difficult Graduation is one weighed down by endemic corruption, systemic unfairness and economic defeat. Romeo (Adrian...
★★★★★ 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....
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ The audacious tagline for Pieces‘ grisly poster – “It’s exactly what you think it is” – isn’t kidding: Juan Piquer Simon’s 1982 splatterfest...
★★★★☆ Adapted from the long-running successful Manga series, the Lone Wolf and Cub films represent the very best in the chanbara genre. This Criterion...
★★★★☆ There aren’t many directors working today with the same ambition and exquisite craftsmanship of James Gray. Despite being renowned for his complex, emotional...
★★★★★ It’s exceedingly rare for a filmmaker to present a deeply disturbed individual on the big screen, one who partakes in all sorts of...
★★★★☆ 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...