Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ In his latest film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, French director Luc Besson offers up a phantasmagorical sci-fi where the thrust is squarely focused on world-building and spectacle, but with scant attention paid to characters and plot.The film is based on a French comic series that Besson has been longing to adapt for years. Retaining […]
★★★★☆ Inspired by true events in 1945, director Martin Zandvliet’s powerful Academy Award-nominated film about Denmark’s treatment of German prisoners, Land of Mine, demonstrates that the aftermath of war can often be just as brutal as the bloody conflict itself.Fearful of an allied invasion, Nazi forces left behind two million landmines on Denmark’s western coast and German prisoners of […]
★★★★☆ Bryan Fogel’s Icarus is a tale of lies, deception and murder with stakes worthy of its Greek antecedent. Seeking to expose the curse of blood doping in his beloved cycling, the filmmaker hurtles dangerously close to the sun before stumbling upon one of the biggest conspiracies in sporting history.It is a bold, quite extraordinary documentary which unfurls before […]
★★★☆☆ Oscar nominee Mark Gill directs this unofficial Steven Patrick Morrissey biopic, featuring Jack Lowden (last seen as a Spitfire pilot in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk) as the outspoken The Smiths frontman in the subdued years leading up to the moment Johnny Marr turns up.It’s a muted affair all in all; the script thin and relatively drama-free, which proves irritating […]