Film Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
★★★★★ In her excellent adaptation of Lee Israel’s literary fraudster memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, director Marielle Heller takes viewers on a hilarious...
★★★★☆ Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six years, R.M.N. is a multi-faceted, oft-bleak, and occasionally surreal portrait of racism and toxic masculinity in Romanian society. In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
★★★★★ Childhood friends Na-Young (Greta Lee) and Hae-Sung’s (Yoo Teo) young lives are irrevocably changed when Na-Young’s family emigrate from South Korea to Canada, until the pair reconnect twelve years later. Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song.
★★★★★ In her excellent adaptation of Lee Israel’s literary fraudster memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, director Marielle Heller takes viewers on a hilarious...
★★★★☆ After the recent centenary of Ingmar Bergman and Criterion Collection’s release of a mammoth thirty-nine film Blu-ray box set, the appeal of Bergman...
★★★★☆ When historians look back at the rise of populism and anti-establishment feeling in the early years of the 21st century, they will almost...
★★★★★ The subject of Alexandria Bombach’s On Her Shoulders is an extraordinary woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, and her tireless campaign for...
★★★☆☆ In Karyn Kusama’s LA-based noir Destroyer, Nicole Kidman stars – and startles – as desiccated detective Erin Bell, revived by the possibility of...
★★★★★ The second film in Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, Orphée’s textural and thematic richness is matched only by its enduring technical innovation. A loose adaptation...
★★★★★ In post-war Paris, an elderly woman is murdered apparently without motive. As the locals puzzle over the identity of the culprit, bafflement soon...
★★★★☆ Two years after the release of his classic, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, director Robert Aldritch revisits psychosis with Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a chilling tale...