CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★★★★ Ostensibly a documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally slippery biographer, Clifford Irving, Orson Welles’ last completed film is more an elusive meditation on the nature of artifice, forgery and reality. F for Fake is a sometimes maddening, always brilliant disruption of the conventional documentary. Opening Continue Reading
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that Sweden has been stepping up their entertainment game. We’ve been seeing Swedish actors rise to the top in Hollywood, Swedish authors writing the next best-seller and all kinds of other forms of entertainment being dominated by the Swedish component. It’s Continue Reading
★★★★★ IMF Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and long-time associates Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are on the trail of the Syndicate, a rogue anarchist network of former spies. When their op goes awry, Ethan and his team must race to avert catastrophe. So far, so Mission: Impossible. Yet Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the famous frozen Ötzal mummy discovered in 1991, Felix Randau’s third feature tells the story of the eponymous Iceman’s final days. Living in a small settlement among the Neolithic Ötzal Alps, tribal leader Kelab (Jürgen Vogel) returns home from hunting to find his family killed, dwellings burned Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Daniel Kokotajlo’s debut Apostasy is a remarkable and authentic mediation on religion, belief, family and loss. Single mother Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) runs a matriarchal household, raising her two adult daughters Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and Alex (Molly Wright) in strict accordance with her devout Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. The daughters seem as Continue Reading
The sprawling, other-worldly deserts combined with isolated communities and the stunning natural backdrops that constitute the great American West have captured our imaginations for generations. From the old Hollywood noir classics like Lawrence of Arabia and 20th Century cult classics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, all the way up to modern Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Bring It On director Peyton Reed returns with Marvel sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, a heartfelt family comedy in which the peril lies in a father-daughter plot, rather than the fate of the universe. One of the joys of the Ant-Man movies is its protagonist, Scott Lang, (Paul Rudd). Continue Reading
★★★★☆ In 1918, a German regiment occupies a small French town, to which they hope to lure the advancing British army before blowing the place up with hidden explosives. Getting wind of the plan, Colonel Alexander MacBibenbrook (Adolfo Celi) sends Scottish soldier Charles Plumpick (Alan Bates) to defuse the bomb Continue Reading
★★★★★ In 1928 Berlin, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is released from prison after serving four years for the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Ida (Barbara Valentin). Based on Alfred Döblin’s celebrated 1929 novel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Weimar-set odyssey is some 15 hours long. Exhausting and exhaustive, Berlin Alexanderplatz is an epic Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Waiting more than a decade to release a sequel, the candy-coloured world of Mamma Mia! returns to cinemas this summer in the form of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Akin to a multi-layered moussaka best served with numerous guests around a gigantic table, Here We Go Again is decadent Continue Reading
★★★★☆ It’s 2028 and rioting fills the streets of Los Angeles. Disputes over water, now privatised, have reached a volatile point and the city is put under curfew. With the water shut down, and a population desperate, the city’s residents have nothing to lose and take to the streets. Within Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “Greed isn’t good” remains the predominant message in Laura Greenfield’s sporadically engrossing and frequently overreaching look at the culture of capitalism. Generation Wealth feels like something of a thesis project for the director, who was behind 2012’s similarly-themed, multiple award-winning The Queen of Versailles. That film was a brilliant Continue Reading
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” Radu Jude’s film claimed the top prize at this year’s festival and it’s easy to understand why. It embraces the kind of boldly political stance of classic Polish cinema from the Communist era like a riff on both Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Olmo Omerzu’s follow-up to the stinging satire of 2015’s Family Film is another tale of children left to their own devices by negligent parents, but this time takes the form of an unsentimental but winning road movie caper Winter Flies. The title presumably refers to resolute dipterans that have refused Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Alice Rohrwacher returns with her remarkable third film about a rural Italian community. Happy as Lazzaro sparkles with soul, enchantment and introspection – it’s no wonder that it took the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes last year. What starts as a relatively straightforward story takes a surprising, gripping turn Continue Reading