★★★★★ There’s something heartening about genius being put in the service of madness. Already this Cannes we’ve seen the exemplar in a fully restored 4K version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but at the Quinzaine a sea-change took place. Robert […]
★★★★★ Time is running out for the Master of Death himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves). After killing his nemesis on the consecrated ground of the Continental Hotel, he’s on the run and ex-communicado. The first film was about revenge, the […]
★★★☆☆ Austrian director Jessica Hausner enters the race for this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes with Little Joe, a modest work of satirical sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw as two genetic engineers who create a “happy” plant. Alice […]
★★★★☆ Expanding on her own 2009 short film, actor turned director Mati Diop returns to the timely subject of economic migrants from Africa braving the open ocean for a better life with Atlantics. Her feature-length debut is an enigmatic ghost […]
★★★☆☆ In the opening scene of The Seventh Seal, Max von Sydow’s knight, washed up on a barren beach, tells Death that his body is ready to die, but he is not. The conflict between the corporeal and the spiritual, […]
★★★★☆ Based on the 1972 Grammy award-winning album of the same name, Amazing Grace is a moving, long-awaited celebration of the late Aretha Franklin. There are no grand gestures of narrative here, but just a simple, delightful montage of Franklin’s […]
★★★★☆ Following his 2016 Palme d’Or triumph with I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Sorry We Missed You, a furious denunciation of zero-hours Britain. We begin in a familiar place: in the dark. A […]
★★★★☆ After exploding onto the international film scene with the Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent, Ciro Guerra returns to cinemas with another story of Colombian tradition. His latest film, Birds of Passage, merges the western gangster genre with a spiritual […]
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is […]
Netflix has emerged over the last few years as one of the big players in cinema. It hasn’t overthrown the box office establishment just yet. Since Netflix don’t release ratings, it’s tough to know just how many people are watching. […]
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an undeadpan comedy which dies halfway through and fails to reanimate itself. Jarmusch’s previous exercises in genre […]
April proved a bumper month for home entertainment aficionados, with the usual suspects – Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series and the Criterion Collection – offering a particularly good selection of art house, genre and Hollywood titles for cinéastes. As one […]
★★★☆☆ Detective Pikachu marks the birth of the Pokémon film franchise in live-action form. The pocket monsters, first established in 1995 by Japanese designer Satoshi Tajiri, have experienced a resurgence of late with the release of Pokémon Go! in 2016, […]
How well do you know your motoring film trivia? Car-related breakdowns occur in more films than you may think. Unsurprisingly, vehicles in films are more likely to break down in a horror movie, with comedies a close second. Some of […]
In 2015, Brady Corbet went from supporting roles in films like Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (US) and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, to suddenly being lauded as one of the most exciting new directors working in American Cinema. […]
