FEST – New Directors New Films Festival roundup
“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right questions, they’ll think about you for days.” This was the advice of […]
Film Review: Vagabond
★★★★★ Back in UK cinemas to mark a BFI retrospective of the French New Wave director, Agnès Varda’s acclaimed 1985 road movie Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, is a veritable masterwork from one of our greatest living filmmakers. A […]
Film Review: Sicario 2: Soldado
★★★☆☆ Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was a masterclass in direction, cinematography, sound design and dramatic tension. This year’s sequel Sicario 2: Soldado, directed by Italian crime-thriller veteran Stefano Sollima, is a solid but less memorable effort. Despite […]
Film Review: Patrick
★★☆☆☆ The phrase “man’s best friend” is put firmly to the test in Patrick, a new British comedy from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie director Maddie Fletcher. Sarah (Beattie Edmondson) is the odd one out of her […]
Film Review: Leave No Trace
★★★★★ Eight years on from Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik offers up Leave No Trace starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, an intricately crafted and haunting drama, based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock. […]
Edinburgh 2018: Meeting Jim review
★★★☆☆ Jim Haynes is the focus of Meeting Jim, an unexpectedly captivating documentary by Ece Ger that’s been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Film award at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. Quite rightly too, […]
Criterion Review: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
★★★★☆ After his best friend Esteban is devoured my a mysterious monster of the deep, the legendary undersea documentarian Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) vows to find and destroy the creature to avenge his friend. Designating the […]
DVD Review: Iron Monkey
★★★★☆ Very loosely based on the childhood of Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hung, Woo-Ping Yuen’s Iron Monkey is a terrifically entertaining action picture in the Hong Kong Kung Fu tradition. Woo-Ping would later go on to […]
Film Review: Incredibles 2
★★★★☆ The Marvel Cinematic Universe may have the market hold, but Incredibles 2 – which arrives some fourteen years after the original – is a superior superhero film to much of their output. It’s also a […]
Edinburgh 2018: Calibre review
★★★★☆ Matt Palmer’s debut feature Calibre is a tense, brutal thriller set in the rural Scottish Highlands. It boasts meaty performances from local talent Jack Lowden and Martin McCann as Vaughn and Marcus respectively, two childhood […]
Five films where lucky breaks save the day
When we think of the world’s most heroic movie protagonists, ranging from superheroes such as Superman and Iron Man, to the likes of The Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Mad Max: Fury Road’s Furiosa, we think of […]
Criterion Review: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
★★★★★ On 25 November 1970, Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s leading authors, attempted a coup d’etat with three members of his private army before committing seppuku. Paul Schrader’s stunning biopic follows Mishima over the course of […]