Christopher Machell
-
Film Review: Why Don’t You Just Die!
★★★☆☆ Matvey (Alexksandr Kuznetsov) waits at the front door of his girlfriend’s father’s apartment, priming himself for the bloody task ahead of him. Priming himself, he utters the mantra, “evil won’t touch me”. It may not touch him, but over the next 100 minutes of this hyper-violent comic thriller, it certainly manages to inflict a…
-
Film Review: Who You Think I Am
★★☆☆☆ In his fifth feature, French director Safy Nebbou marshals a game Juliette Binoche through a twisty-turny plot that is equal parts psychological melodrama, romance, and genre thriller. But while Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.…
-
Film Review: The Grand Bizarre
★★★★★ After wowing festival audiences at its world premiere at Locarno back in 2018, Jodie Mack’s hypnotic, experimental film-cum-documentary finally finds its way on to release via MUBI. Now that it’s finally here, what are we to make of Mack’s journey into textiled abstraction? The Grand Bizarre is Mack’s first film approaching feature-length, though still…
-
Cinema in the Time of Corona: Watching the latest releases at home
With cinemas closed, major releases postponed, and current productions in limbo, this is a dark time for filmmaking. It’s horrible to imagine that after months in shutdown with no revenue, cinemas already struggling may not survive this crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has potentially catastrophic consequences for film culture and for the thousands of people employed…
-
Film Review: Dogs Don’t Wear Pants
★★★★☆ After his wife drowns in a tragic accident, Juha (Pekka Strang) enters a lengthy bout of depression, unable to connect with either his daughter, Elli (Ilhona Huhta), or his own feelings. A chance encounter with dominatrix Mona (Krista Kosonen) sets him on a new path of discovery. An erotic, blackly comic drama, Finnish director…
-
Film Review: Fire Will Come
★★★★★ It’s 1989 and convicted arsonist Amador (Amador Arias) has just been released from prison after setting forest fires in the Spanish countryside. Returning to his maternal home in the autonomous community of Galicia in northwest Spain, the quiet Amador tries to settle into the slowed quotidian rhythms of the landscape. French director Oliver Laxe’s…
-
Cinema Made in Italy 2020 highlights
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, Cinema Made in Italy returned to London this month to showcase a surfeit of contemporary Italian cinema. New films were screened from 4-9 March, in addition to a special screening of Liliana Cavani’s 1974 psychological erotic classic, The Night Porter. Cinema Made in Italy took place at the Ciné Lumière, hosted by…
-
Film Review: Calm with Horses
★★★★☆ “Violence,” – Douglas ‘The Arm’ muses – “is not always the work of hateful men. It’s just their way of making sense of the world”. Certainly, in director Nick Rowland’s astonishing, brutal feature debut, Calm with Horses, violence seems to be the only way of making sense of anything. Arm was once a boxer…
-
Film Review: Vitalina Varela
★★★★★ Portuguese director and cinéaste’s favourite Pedro Costa’s seventh feature – his first since 2014’s Horse Money – is a work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters. After premiering last year at the Locarno Film Festival, Vitalina Varela will delight devotees of Costa’s earlier…
-
Film Review: The Invisible Man
★★★★☆ Moonlit waves crash against coastal rocks, the darkness punctured only by an amber light coming from the windows of a mansion sat atop the cliff above. It’s a neo-Gothic scene wholly worthy of the classic studio chillers, while the film’s title fades in a cool, 1990s-esque glassy font. Depending on when you start counting,…