★★☆☆☆ Richard Linklater aficionados will be familiar with the director’s unique ability to conjure up cinematic poetry from a set of trademarked ingredients: actors engaging in endless, often day-long conversations, and a camera following their footsteps.Last Flag Flying contains all the elements that made Linklater a cult figure in the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A young chef tries to booze and bang the pain away in director Peter Mackie Burns’ engaging, charming comic drama Daphne. Set in London, in a largely nocturnal landscape of fleeting pleasures and unacknowledged hurts, it makes for a timely study of young angst. Millennials are a sordid bunch, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Midi Z’s The Road to Mandalay lacks any of the exotic longing or Orientalism implied by the Kipling poem it derives its name from. Instead, the Myanmar-born director has created a Shakespearean tragedy charting the dehumanising process of two migrants. The films of Midi Z have always been torn Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Set in the unforgiving American West at the end of the 19th century, Brimstone – the first English language film written and directed by Dutchman Martin Koolhoven – is a tale of one woman’s quest for survival and retribution.Liz, superbly portrayed by Dakota Fanning, is a young woman whose Continue Reading
★★★★★ Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women tells three stories of female malcontent in Montana, one of the least populous states in the United States. Connected by only the thinnest of narrative threads, each story offers delicate, quietly moving insight into the lives of its subjects.Lawyer Laura Wells (Laura Dern) has a Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Following on from her stylish and well-received debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, American-Iranian Ana Lily Amirpour returns with The Bad Batch (Netflix, 22 Sep), a post-apocalyptic cannibal movie that devours its influences without ever getting to the red meat.Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, a girl with a Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The anguished gaze and furious composure of bereaved sibling Yance Ford makes his film, Strong Island, a deeply personal essay on grief. Two decades after the fatal shooting of his brother, the restraint he employs in telling his family’s quest for justice leaves its mark.“Are you uncomfortable?” Ford asks, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ An older man and a younger woman accidentally discover that, every night, they encounter each other in their dreams as a pair of deer. The premise of Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul sounds like the perfect recipe for rom-com cheesiness, yet it’s anything but.At first astounded, the couple Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Wimbledon, 1980. John McEnroe (Shia LeBeouf) has reached the final of the men’s singles, despite his short temper with umpires and growing public unpopularity. Facing off against McEnroe is the seemingly unstoppable Björn Borg (an uncanny Sverrir Gudnason). Director Janus Metz’s Borg vs McEnroe may well be inspired by Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Billed as a “coming of middle-age story”, the first 20 minutes of Suntan is easily mistaken for a charming melodrama about rediscovering one’s youth. But this tale of obsession, emotional immaturity and entitlement is much more interesting, and darker, than that.Kostis (Efthymis Papadimitriou) arrives as the new doctor an Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A critical success on release, the enormous budget of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 epic comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World meant that it only just scraped a profit. The premise: a group of strangers race across America to try to get to a rumoured buried treasure.It’s worth noting Continue Reading
As the 2017 Toronto Film Festival closes, we take a look at our top picks from the festival. Despite already premiering in Venice, Darren Aronofsky’s unhinged Mother! created the most buzz on the ground, garnering rave reviews from festival-goers and critics alike.Sadly, that hasn’t translated to box office success, with Continue Reading
★★★★★ Using the folkloric tropes of a deep, dark wood and tales of a beast terrorising the countryside, with his feature debut Valley of Shadows Norwegian director Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen has crafted one of the year’s finest, most deeply affecting psychological dramas.As with all the best ghost stories, this one Continue Reading
★★★★★ Following her co-director credit on 2008’s Nights and Weekends, Greta Gerwig goes it alone directing Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird. A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig’s warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut. High school senior Christine (Ronan) – now insisting Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Following this year’s The Levelling and God’s Own Country, the decaying farmlands of rural England appear to be replacing the urban concrete high-rise as the preferred setting for British social realism. Clio Barnard’s Dark River may well be the cream of this particular crop.Barnard, whose Yorkshire-centric filmography already includes Continue Reading