Christopher Machell
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Film Review: The Other Lamb
★★★★☆ This year’s surfeit of films about cults hits its stride with Malgorzata Szumowska’s first English-language picture. A visceral, Atwoodian journey, The Other Lamb is as much an examination of narcissism and the existing structures of gendered power as it is of the limits of faith. Living a philistine existence and clad in pseudo-puritanical garb, the…
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Film Review: Being a Human Person
★★★★☆ Charting the production of Roy Andersson’s latest and possibly final film, About Endlessness, documentarian Fred Scott explores in his first feature the career of one of Sweden’s most beloved and singular filmmakers. The result is an affectionate and often enchanting tribute that is as in thrall to the affable Andersson as it is compelled…
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#LFF 2020: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets review
★★★★☆ Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Shot over the course of a single night, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets depicts the final night of ‘The Roaring 20s’, a Las Vegas bar…
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Film Review: Saint Maud
★★★★☆ Director Rose Glass makes her feature debut with this visceral psychological horror. While the festival chatter has lately been dominated by Gotham’s most notorious villain, Saint Maud is the dive into obsession, isolation and urban deprivation that you need right now. Maud (Morfydd Clark) is convinced that she was put on this earth for a higher…
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Film Review: On the Rocks
★★★★☆ Returning to the director’s chair for the first time since 2017’s The Beguiled, and following the pop-baroque of efforts like Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks is back-to-basics filmmaking. It may well also be her most mature picture to date. Growing slowly distant with husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) as he takes lengthy business…
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Film Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7
★★★★☆ On 28 August 1968, during one of the bloodiest summers of the Vietnam War, several thousand protestors made their way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The protestors violently clashed with authorities in what was later described by the official enquiry as a “police riot“. The so-called “Chicago 7” (initially eight) were arrested…
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Film Review: Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder
★★★★★ Following his dual Oscar wins for Parasite – unprecedented for a foreign language feature – way back in February, South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho is perhaps this year’s most important director, not least because his films – rooted as they are in class politics and manic heightened realities – are so very 2020. So…
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Film Review: Rocks
★★★★★ With her fourth feature, director Sarah Gavron offers up one of the year’s best British films. Developed and written organically in collaboration with its young cast, Rocks is a faultlessly authentic study of contemporary young life in the inner city. After Shola ‘Rocks’ (Bukky Bakray) mother disappears leaving only a note of apology and…
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Film Review: White Riot
★★★★☆ Building on her previous documentary short of the same name, Rubika Shah’s White Riot is an engaging and important study of Rock Against Racism, a movement formed in 1976 in response to the rising racism of the British political and social landscapes. In febrile times such as these, it’s difficult to imagine White Riot…
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Film Review: Real
★★★☆☆ British actor Aki Omoshaybi directs his first feature Real, a tale of beleaguered young love. Crafting an intimate, impressionistic story Omoshaybi is also impressive in the lead as lovelorn Kyle, while Pippa Bennett Warner is affecting as the object of his affections, single mother and recovering alcoholic Jamie. Kyle first meets Jamie at the…