2017
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FrightFest 2017: Our programme highlights
FrightFest is a genre fan’s Christmas – a Black Christmas, naturally. 2017 marks its 18th edition and the UK’s premier horror cinema festival has returned to what was always its best venue: The Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, now run by the Cineworld chain. Attendees will remember well the experience of sitting in that giant…
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Film Review: Mimosas
★★★★☆ Space, time and meaning cascade over one another in bewildering fashion in writer-director Oliver Laxe’s second feature Mimosas. It’s a mesmerising, mercurial film in which an arduous undertaking takes on personal, spiritual significance as well as physical form.The Spanish filmmaker sets this thought-provoking quest of faith and self-affirmation in his now home country of…
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Film Review: Logan Lucky
★★★★☆ After a four-year hiatus Steven Soderbergh has returned to feature filmmaking with Logan Lucky – and what a return it is. Channing Tatum is Jimmy Logan, a devoted father struggling to cut a deal with his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) for custody of their daughter.Deciding to even the odds with his run of bad luck,…
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Film Review: Hotel Salvation
★★★★☆ Set in Varanasi, Shubhashish Bhutiani’s remarkably assured debut feature, starring Lalit Behl and Adil Hussain, has already won plaudits and awards on the festival circuit. Shot when he was just 23, Hotel Salvation is a bittersweet meditation on life, death and salvation. Haunted by a recurring dream, seventy-seven-year old Daya (Behl) is convinced it…
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Film Review: Detroit
★★★★☆ An historical drama based on real-life events using a mix of documentary footage alongside fictional re-enactment, Kathryn Bigelow’s long-awaited Detroit is a no-holds-barred depiction of police brutality and racism set amid the 1967 riots.Opening with a beautiful animation based on Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of The Great Migration, overlaid with text detailing the racism in…
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Film Review: Bushwick
★★☆☆☆ Many a film has landed in Cannes laden with Sundance buzz. One year it was Beasts of the Southern Wild, another it was Whiplash. The latter injury will have befallen many who went into Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott’s B-movie wannabe Bushwick with high expectations.We approach New York via aerial helicopter shots, but something’s…
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Film Review: American Made
★★★☆☆ Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman and megastar Tom Cruise collaborate for the second time on American Made, a rogue’s tale set in the bloody world of 1980s drug trafficking. Cruise rides the Breaking Bad and Narcos train, only not as well as either.Taking a time out from saving the world, Cruise puts on…
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DVD Review: Risk
★★★★☆ It’s always instructive to compare a director’s latest film with their previous efforts, and this is certainly the case with Laura Poitras’ Risk. Her first feature since 2014’s Citizenfour, the differences between the two are in this case more telling than the similarities.While both documentaries rely on unparalleled access to people (Julian Assange and…
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DVD Review: My Beautiful Laundrette
★★★★☆ An Asian gentleman boisterously raising a glass to “this damn country, which we love and hate” perfectly encapsulates the conflicted nature of the immigrant experience in Stephen Frears’ wry take on capitalist-era London through the prism of first generation British Pakistanis.The third feature from the hugely prolific Frears (and the first of Working Title’s…
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Criterion Review: Lord of the Flies
★★★★☆ William Golding’s tale of public schoolboys stranded on a desert island is an iconic depiction of fundamental savagery. More than fifty years on, Peter Brook’s 1963 Lord of the Flies remains the definitive film, its hallucinogenic brutality as terrifying as ever. The film opens with schoolboy Ralph (James Aubrey), moving through the forest of…
