Day: 30 October 2020

★★★☆☆ From a script by Sarah Gubbin – who adapted a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell – whose story was based on the prolific horror author Shirley Jackson – Josephine Decker’s fourth feature is (to say the least) a multi-layered affair. Demanding patience and perseverance, we dig down through agoraphobia, Continue Reading

★★★★☆ The slow rot of psychological decay is brought into the physical realm with creeping, insidious stealth by Natalia Erika James in her highly assured, thought-provoking feature debut, Relic. Re-framing more traditional genre choices for representing dementia, the Japanese-Australian filmmaker has crafted a chilling, mysterious horror to communicate the confusion and Continue Reading

★★★★☆ Again proving that great strength can be drawn from laying bare perceived weakness, Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief is an art heist film like no other and an arresting documentary of startling, often brutal, emotional honesty. His 2016 debut, Magnus, which charted the rise to stardom of a chess prodigy Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ Riz Ahmed battles questions of cultural and religious identity, familial expectation, self and health in order to find his calling, and to find his way home, in Mogul Mowgli. Knowing where you’re going cannot be known without knowing where you’ve come from, and director Bassam Tariq’s layered narrative feature debut shifts Continue Reading

★★★★☆ “You’d never know what’s underneath, unless someone told you.” History books, lectures and internet searches cannot possibly substitute hearing first-hand the effects of Europe’s colonialist past on one of the most impoverished countries in the world. In Rob Lemkin’s African Apocalypse, Oxford University student Femi Nylander’s voyage of discovery Continue Reading