Film Review: Long Day’s Journey into Night
★★★★☆ “The difference between film and memory is that films are always false”, muses protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) early on in Long Day’s...
★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.
★★★★☆ There is tragedy and there is comedy, but the hinterland has never really received a proper definition. Melodrama suggests histrionics and musical accompaniment milking the emotional teat. Drama is too broad. And anyone who suggests “dramedy” should be punished. It would be “dramedic”.
★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega), can the ghost(face)s of the past be laid to rest?
★★★☆☆ His heavyweight champion status secured, the now-retired Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) spends his days lounging around his Hollywood mansion, having tea parties with daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) and running his gym with coach Little Duke (Wood Harris). But when a long-forgotten figure from Adonis’ past returns, his future is thrown into question.
★★★★★ Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are best friends. At 13, they are intelligent and autonomous enough to be allowed a certain freedom, but still full of the childish and spontaneous joy of being and imagining. They pretend villains are attacking the castle, run through the flower fields, and have so many sleepovers together that Leo’s mum wonders aloud if he’ll ever come home.
★★★☆☆ “Family isn’t a word…it’s a sentence”. So ran the tagline to The Royal Tenenbaums. For Hirokazu Kore-eda it could be argued that it’s a whole career. From Still Walking to the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, the Japanese auteur has spent the greater part of his career delineating the lines of attraction and repulsion, the dynamics of duty and care that make up families – both real and alternative.
★★★★☆ “The difference between film and memory is that films are always false”, muses protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) early on in Long Day’s...
Tail-ended by superb new offerings from the likes of Martin Scorsese (The Irishman), Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) and Greta Gerwig (Little Women), 2019 has...
★☆☆☆☆ Rey (Daisy Ridley) is continuing her force training, now under the tutelage of Leia (a disturbingly reanimated Carrie Fisher). Meanwhile, we are told...
With Netflix’s The Irishman and Marriage Story dominating early awards season debate – and both featuring in our collective top ten – the streaming...
★★★★☆ Alex Gibney returns with this gripping study of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch-turned-activist who was sentenced to nine years in prison after challenging...
While the likes of Paul Feig’s Last Christmas and the 2018 reboot of Dr Seuss’s The Grinch may have performed well at the UK box...
If there was ever a way to catch the attention of your audience, it’s with an eye-catching film poster. Posters alone can bring people...
★★★★☆ Following his 2017 documentary Last Men in Aleppo, Feras Fayyad returns to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, this time in the besieged city...
We’re getting close to the end of 2019, and while some people are letting out sighs of relief upon hearing that, most us movie...
Seeing out its 23rd edition as the snow gently fell outside of Tallinn’s Russian Theatre, the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) yesterday crowned Anshul...
★★★★★ Among the greatest living filmmakers in the world, Martin Scorsese has defined American cinema for a generation. His work has encompassed family melodrama,...
★★★☆☆ Turning the traditional story of Punch and Judy on its head with a joyously feminist reinterpretation, debut writer and director Mirrah Foulkes offers...
Sometimes the most iconic heroes are only as good as their villains are. Super strength, being able to fly, and time travel, are obviously...
As the nights have drawn in over the last couple of months, the crop of home video release have been especially abundant. Criterion’s release...