Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ Though the twists and turns of an extraordinary story – a baby stolen at birth, mistaken identities, genealogical discoveries, a fifty-year quest for the truth – are compelling, Ursula Macfarlane’s The Lost Sons has the feel of a somewhat formulaic, made-for-TV documentary.
Lotteries are commonplace across the US, with 45 states offering their own take on this traditional collective gambling scheme, generating tens of billions of dollars each year. While most players will simply think of the potential benefits that they will […]
★★★☆☆ Bound by a self-imposed obligation to send money to family back home in Haiti, caregiver Ludi works all the hours God sends in Floridian filmmaker Edson Jean’s debut Ludi.
★★★★☆ In the opening moments of Paola Calvo and Patrick Jasim’s Luchadoras, female workers take a bumpy bus ride to factories situated on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
★★★★☆ Jasmine Stodel’s Kid Candidate follows 24-year-old Hayden Pedigo from debut campaign no-hoper to improbable torchbearer for the disenfranchised youth and ignored, impoverished minorities of Amarillo, Texas.
Online slot games are a popular way to pass the time. Easy to play, they allow players to experience potentially big payouts. Plus, they’re great fun. In an attempt to try and attract new audiences, games developers are always trying […]
★★★★★ Since his first short, La impresión de una guerra, debuted in 2015 Colombian director Camilo Restrepo quickly drew notice on the festival circuit, following up with 2016’s Cilaos and La bouche in 2017. Now, the imaginative canvas on which […]
★★☆☆☆ Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), an outspoken and successful writer a popular Dutch newspaper, is coming under increasing attack from a legion of online, exclusively male trolls. When she discovers that one of them is her inconsiderate neighbour, Femke snaps […]
★★★★★ “The concept of resilience is a powerful one.” Channelling the fortitude and resolve with which his beloved city of Boston recovered from the 2013 marathon bombing, Mayor Marty Walsh’s words echo a key tenet of Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall. […]
★★★★☆ Celeste Bell reassembles her mother’s life, reclaims her image and recalls their own troubled relationship in Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché. Co-directed with Paul Sng, it is an affecting, delicately balanced documentary of conflictual opposites, mental trauma and […]
★★★★☆ All the world’s a stage for veteran documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi. Notturno, his latest piece of deeply humanist cinematic theatre, concerns itself with the aftermath of the military coups, authoritarianism and foreign imperialism that have plagued the Middle East […]
★★☆☆☆ British director Jamie Patterson’s latest film follows the eponymous Justine (Tallulah Haddon) a young malcontent living in Brighton. Opening as she is awoken from a drunken slumber by her angry landlord demanding rent, we follow Justine through the preceding […]