Christopher Machell

★★☆☆☆ Two years after Godzilla took his place as the alpha kaiju, old atomic breath has gone to ground. Meanwhile, the simian king of Skull Island has been contained in a Truman Show-esque monitoring station after a storm destroyed his home and killed all but one of its human inhabitants. When Godzilla resurfaces to destroy…

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★★★★☆ Japanese director Tezuka Macoto’s cult 1985 musical is granted a delirious and welcome encore in this re-release. Losing none of its joie de vivre, humour, or heart, The Legend of the Stardust Brothers is a broad, bonkers, and irrepressible mock-biopic cast in equal parts from the moulds of A Hard Day’s Night, Obayashi Nobuhiko’s…

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★★★★★ 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 Restrepo paints has widened with his feature debut, Los conductos. A spinning flashlight, a gunshot;…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 and begins hunting her online tormentors in a deadly rampage. In a free society, how…

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★★☆☆☆ 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 two months of her life. It’s always a bit of a tell when a film…

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★★★★☆ Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist at the time working for the Washington Post, was assassinated on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Released in the week where the international community finally admitted the Saudi Crown Prince’s involvement, Bryan Fogel’s new documentary painstakingly – and painfully – traces the moments up…

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★★★☆☆ More than four years after it premiered at the 2016 London Film Festival, British-Nigerian director Joseph A. Adesunloye’s feature debut finally sees the light of day. A languorous journey into social disaffection and familial rediscovery, White Colour Black’s long-awaited release is well deserved, featuring an understated central turn from the talented Dudley O’Shaughnessy. Leke…

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★★★★☆ French filmmaker Charlène Favier explores a sexually abusive relationship between a talented young skier and her predatory coach in Slalom. Directed with both sensitivity and brio, this gripping and haunting drama gets to the heart of the power that abusers hold over their victims. In the wake of the publication of Camille Kouchner’s (daughter…

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★★★★☆ Since September, Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) tells us, she has thought about nothing but a man she can’t have. “I kept working, I went to movies, I did the shopping, I read. But everything I did seemed to be cut off from reality”. In sensual romantic drama Simple Passion, Lebanese-born director Danielle Arbid captures viscerally…

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★☆☆☆☆ Twenty-two years after the release of The Matrix, documentarian Rodney Ascher examines the question of whether we can ever really know what’s real in this incurious and intellectually questionable documentary. Ascher’s previous films – The Shining-inspired Room 237 and his somnambulant Nightmare among them – have always had an element of the paranoid and…

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