Film Reviews & More
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★☆ Following a group of teenage girls, La Mif is a nuanced and moving study of life in a care home in Geneva. No single performer – largely non-professional actors – in the piece stands above the rest. Rather, the cast work in unison to give a singular, outstanding ensemble performance.
★★★☆☆ Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s The Real Charlie Chaplin grapples with the conundrum at the heart of the silent era’s greatest clown: that no one could ever know really know the person behind the performance.
★★★★★ Adapted from the novel by Alexey Salnikov’s, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu is as dense and impenetrable as it is lurching, captivating and perplexing. It’s a captivating, purgatorial nightmare that describes the feverish breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society.
★★★★★ Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s sixth fiction feature arrives after it took his native Chad by storm last year. Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.
★★★★★ “There is no silent history…no matter how much they lie to it, human history refuses to shut up”. Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.
★★★☆☆ The second adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, after Edmund Goulding’s 1947 big-screen version, Mexican master filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.
★★★★☆ British director Andrea Arnold follows up 2016’s American Honey and a sojourn in television with her first documentary, Cow. A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.
★★★★☆ Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the acclaimed director of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, makes his return to UK screens this week – a full six years after his last feature – with the Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria.
