CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★★★★ Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos returns to screens with his most accessible and enjoyable film to date: The Favourite, an Eighteenth century farce, inked in gall and played with vigour. Think Mean Girls written by Jonathan Swift. Poor cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) – a noblewoman fallen on hard times – makes Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A troubled young man goes on tour with a renowned lobotomist in Rick Alverson’s wintry new work The Mountain, showing in competition at the 75th edition of the Venice International Film Festival. Andy (Tye Sheridan) lives with his father (Udo Kier) and works at the ice rink where his father Continue Reading
★★★★☆ There is a ruined church that appears twice in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War: once at the beginning and once at the end, which serves as an authentic counterpoint to the fake heritage the new communist government is trying to create. Lacking a roof and strewn with rubble, it nonetheless feels Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Marking the film debut of Henson Alternative, a banner of The Jim Henson Company that specialises in adult content, The Happytime Murders is a puppet-based black comedy which definitely isn’t for kids. Based in a world where puppets and humans co-exist, the plot centres on puppet ex-detective-now-private-investigator Phil Phillips Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Filmed in two separate parts by Terence Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives explores his childhood and early adulthood in the Liverpool of the 1940s and 1950s through the characters of Tony (Dean Williams), his authoritarian father Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite), loving mother (Freda Dowie) and lively sisters Eileen (Angela Walsh) Continue Reading