Month: September 2022
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Film Review: In Front of Your Face
★★★★★ After debuting at Cannes last year, celebrated Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s In Front of Your Face arrives on UK screens. A typically minimalist outing, director Hong’s film is a devastating drama whose affect creeps up on the audience so quietly that it is barely noticeable until after the final blow has landed.
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Film Review: Don’t Worry Darling
★★☆☆☆ With a title like Don’t Worry Darling the reviews really write themselves. “Worry, Darling” will no doubt be used in at least half of them. Booksmart director Olivia Wilde’s sophomore feature arrives in cinemas amidst a flurry of negative press and PR missteps which have little to do with the film.
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Film Review: After Yang
★★★★☆ South Korean-born American director Kogonada’s After Yang is a moving, subtle and grounded work of science fiction that doesn’t necessarily get to the core of its myriad issues, but certainly hits the heart. How refreshing to see a version of the future not dictated by the grim pessimism that Black Mirror revels in.
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Is your Netflix subscription worth it?
The streaming landscape just isn’t the same as it used to be, with Disney+, Amazon Prime, and others vying for people’s attention and wallets with their own high-quality, exclusive content. As a result, Netflix’s own value for money has come under increased scrutiny as it has shifted away from curating externally-produced films and TV to…
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Film Review: Moonage Daydream
★★★★☆ On 10 January 2016, everything went wrong. It was reminiscent of the poem The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara: “everyone and I stopped breathing”. In the years following the death of David Bowie we’ve had Brexit, Donald Trump as President, a global pandemic killed millions of people and we are now on the…
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Film Review: Funny Pages
★★★★☆ Aspiring comic artist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) has just graduated from high school with long-suffering friend Miles (Miles Emanuel). After witnessing the death of his esteemed, unconventional art teacher, Robert leaves home, gets a job and sets out to make his name as an artist in this idiosyncratic, unsettling and very funny coming-of-age story.
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Film Review: The Retaliators
★★★★☆ Written by first-time screenwriters Darren and Jeff Allen Geare, The Retaliators is a rock ‘n’ roll ride into the freaky side of vengeance. Bridget Smith and Samuel Gonzalez Jr’s bloody thriller transgressively argues for violence as a rejuvenating force, a great problem-solver, and eye-for-an-eye revenge being a righteous act.
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Venice 2022: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed wins Golden Lion
The head of this year’s Venice jury Julianne Moore awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, her profile of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family. It’s a brilliant, committed piece of activist cinema.
