Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ A nostalgic, blood and rain-splattered love letter to London and all that is and has ever been good, bad and decidedly ugly about the Big Smoke, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is, surprisingly, the director’s first effort to screen at the London Film Festival.
★★★☆☆ Tracking the dealings of a Swiss banker growing increasingly frantic to hang on to lucrative clients spooked by the turmoil, Azor eschews outward thrills or genre intrigue in favour of unspoken dread.
★★★★☆ The directorial debut of Rebecca Hall, Passing is an intoxicating, dreamlike adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novella of the same name. A deeply personal endeavour for the first-time writer-filmmaker, this tale of race, gender and social mobility in late 1920s New York is told with poise and a softly-spoken fervour.
★★★☆☆ The past cannot and will not stay buried in Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s Wild Indian. A tale of generational violence passed down from fathers to sons, it features two young men who share a despicable secret, scarring them for life in ways both struggle to reconcile.
★★★★☆ Denis Villeneuve returns to the big screen with his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic. Grander in scope than any of Villeneuve’s work yet, Dune is proper, ambitious blockbuster filmmaking for grown-ups.
★★★★☆ The French Dispatch of Wes Anderson’s latest film’s title is a fictional magazine, set up by proprietor and editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a European supplement for a Kansas newspaper owned by his father.
★★☆☆☆ Following up his 2016 feature debut My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, comic book writer and filmmaker Dash Shaw continues with his quirky style of animation with Cryptozoo, a countercultural-tinted riff on environmentalism.
A good prison escape film is not just a film that depicts a jail break or escaped inmates. The film should centrally emphasise the escape, both tonally and practically, while also considering the circumstances that necessitate the escape.
★★☆☆☆ Told in a loose beginning, middle and end, Jacques Audiard’s criss-crossing Paris, 13th District revolves principally between the film’s three central characters: Émilie (Lucie Zhang), Camille (Makita Samba) and Nora (Noémie Merlant).
★★★★★ A visionary crossover of the theatrical and the cinematic, ear for eye demonstrates writer-director debbie tucker green’s remarkable creative versatility and clarity of expression.
★★★★☆ All that glitters is not gold, but there is positivity to be found in radioactivity. Co-directed by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, the haunting supernatural forces at work in Never Gonna Snow Again are elusive, inexplicable and yet perfectly in sync with reality.
★★★★☆ Set mainly in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian-born filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão examines the all-encompassing injustices of patriarchy through the story of two sisters’ lifelong dedication to one another.