Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ The lives of painters tend to be told with broad strokes. Famous artists are portrayed as tortured and romantic or else their work hangs over the story, weighing it down with a set of cultural expectations which are hard […]
★★★★☆ Moonlit waves crash against coastal rocks, the darkness punctured only by an amber light coming from the windows of a mansion sat atop the cliff above. It’s a neo-Gothic scene wholly worthy of the classic studio chillers, while the […]
★★★☆☆ An adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space, filmmaker Richard Stanley’s latest is a richly textured, if not entirely coherent, descent into madness, body horror and technological anxiety. After a meteorite crashes in the Gardner […]
★★★☆☆ Michael Winterbottom brings together a who’s who of British comic talent for his fast fashion satire Greed. Conceived as a biting commentary on inequality, sweatshop labour and…well, greed, the film lacks fluency and laughs, rarely managing to lands its […]
★★★★☆ An acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary, Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family chronicles one family’s privately run ambulance, saving lives and attempting to break-even during wee hours in Mexico City. What do you do when the ambulance chasers are other […]
★★★★☆ In her sixth feature, Austrian director Jessica Hausner brings an intense, minimalistic creepiness to this science fiction tale of floral manipulation. Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually […]
Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds was published in 1952 in her collection The Apple Tree. Telling the story of a Cornish village besieged by marauding birds, it would be adapted several times for TV, film and radio, most […]
★★★☆☆ Autumn de Wilde’s debut feature – and the fourth big-screen version of Jane Austen’s novel Emma – is a handsome and witty if slightly uninspiring adaptation buoyed by a surfeit of game British acting talent and a quite delightful […]
★★★☆☆ Japanese horror maestro Takashi Miike is back with this dive into comic book-style, hyper-violent crime noodling. First Love is not among the director’s best work – not by a long shot. Nevertheless, there’s enough of Miike’s trademark bonkers sensibilities to […]
Parasite’s Korean director Bong Joon-ho upset the odds to win both Best Picture and Best Director at this year’s Academy Awards on a night of mixed feelings over the Academy’s perceived lack of diversity.
★★★★☆ Margot Robbie stars as Harley Quinn in Cathy Yan’s spin-off to 2016’s Suicide Squad. But where its predecessor was a mirthless, incoherent mess, Birds of Prey is a chaotic, violent multi-coloured joy; easily the best of DC’s extended universe […]
It may be early February but – thanks to a compressed awards season – the 92nd Academy Awards are almost upon us. Once again, concerns over diversity and representation have dominated the discourse, with only one non-white nominee across the four acting categories in the form of British actress Cynthia Erivo.