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.
★★★★☆ Two young friends, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel), take a fateful working retreat in a forest cabin on Germany’s Baltic coast. German director Christian Petzold’s latest is a tense, emotionally fraught drama, layered with smouldering internal conflict that – by its incendiary close – invariably catches alight.
★★★★☆ Promoting his latest work, a successful writer returns to his hometown and the site of his first love. Olivier Peyon’s sixth feature is a bittersweet bildungsroman told in reverse; a study of identity reconciled too late. In examining the reflexive, redemptive power of fiction, Lie With Me is a moving story of love lost to time.
★★★★☆ After an eleven-year hiatus, Rome-born director Emanuele Crialese returned to the cinema last year with the Venice premiere of this family drama. Now arriving on UK cinema screens, the 1970s-set L’immensità is a multilayered study of family life in disintegration.
★★☆☆☆ Trapped in an unhappy relationship and a life going nowhere fast, Cheyenne’s (Kristi Ray) discovery that she is pregnant gives her the kick that she needs to leave her partner, Alex (Hadyn Winston). American writer-director Erika Arlee’s debut feature showcases strong performances and nice visual flourishes, but A Song for Imogene struggles to find an emotional hook.
★★★★☆ Among the most popular and iconic toys in the world, since its 1959 inception, the Barbie doll has delighted children while embodying unrealistic beauty standards for women. Is Barbie a sexist stereotype or neo-feminist icon? Erstwhile indie director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach asks, why not both?
★★★★☆ Christopher Nolan directs his first biopic, depicting the scientist who developed the atomic bombs that would devastate and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bring an end to the Second World War. The British director’s twelfth feature is a fascinating and accomplished cinematic object, but as a study of greatness, Oppenheimer’s subject is often obscured by its author’s auteurist preoccupations.
★★★★☆ Deep under the ice of the Bering Strait, a tactical exercise on a Russian submarine goes badly wrong. As the bodies of the doomed sub float to the surface, something sinister is hidden inside its hull. The first of a two-parter, Christopher McQuarrie helms the seventh episode of the era’s premier action series.
★★★★☆ The British-Moroccan director of Lynn + Lucy, Fyzal Boulifa, returns to screens with this deeply moving tale of a mother and son living on the margins of society. Sharing its name with a 1950 Joan Crawford film, The Damned Don’t Cry has thematic resonance with its namesake as a study of women’s vulnerability in a patriarchal society and the criminalising of marginalised lives.
