CineVue
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Can Netflix’s The Gentlemen series improve upon the film?
Guy Ritchie’s 2019 offering The Gentlemen was a return to form for the British director. He went back to his gangster roots and delivered a fresh and innovative crime tale set in London. Thanks to the popularity of that picture, a spinoff series is set for release via Netflix in 2023/2024.
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#LFF 2023: The Zone of Interest review
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
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#LFF 2023: Evil Does Not Exist review
★★★★☆ Once, when talking about Stanley Kubrick’s seminal Barry Lyndon, Martin Scorsese referred to the film’s “almost Japanese sense of time”. If one was to be cynical, one could snipe that it’s just a fancy way of saying a film is boring, but it goes to the point of how cinema makes the relativity of time…
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#LFF 2023: Hit Man review
★★★★☆ Tales of lone assassins and guns for hire are all based on urban myths. That’s the fact gleefully revealed in Richard Linklater’s latest crime comedy Hit Man, premiering at Venice this week. “Think about it,” asks the film’s protagonist Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), “is someone really going to risk the death penalty for a…
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Filmfest Hamburg 2023: Our festival highlights
The 31st Filmfest Hamburg, held from 28 September to 7 October, features a global lineup with highlights from different regions, including a subset of Ukrainian films due to the ongoing war. Titles include Timm Kröger’s The Theory of Everything, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.
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#LFF 2023: Monster review
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
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Film Review: R.M.N.
★★★★☆ Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six years, R.M.N. is a multi-faceted, oft-bleak, and occasionally surreal portrait of racism and toxic masculinity in Romanian society. In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.
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Film Review: Rotting in the Sun
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
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Film Review: El Conde
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
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Outlaw Johnny Black: the spiritual sequel to Black Dynamite
Outlaw Johnny Black is one of the most intriguing new movies of 2023, with a Western setting that introduces elements like comedy, adventure, and martial arts to hopefully provide something new and fresh. Will it be a success and is there a chance that it creates a new genre where the classic Western formula goes…