Category: Christopher Machell
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Film Review: Medusa Deluxe
★★★★☆ In the run-up to a regional hairdressing competition, the leading entrant is found mutilated. British director Thomas Hardiman’s debut film is a gripping, dizzyingly stylish thriller. With a tightly-woven plot, dazzling cinematography and a razor-sharp cast of characters, Medusa Deluxe is Brit neo-noir at its knotty best.
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Film Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
★★★★☆ The first of a two-parter, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is bigger, bolder and grander than its predecessor, and with little serious competition from Marvel or DC’s live-action factories, looks set to be the best superhero film of the year.
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Film Review: Move Me No Mountain
★★☆☆☆ Bereavement, mental health, the threadbare US social welfare system and homelessness are the heavy topics that British-born director Deborah Richards tackles in her debut feature. Unfortunately, their worthy but superficial and somewhat incoherent presentation means that Move Me No Mountain is an emotionally and thematically inert experience.
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Film Review: Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
★★★★☆ Nam June Paik is commonly referred to as the “father of video art”. In her debut feature, director Amanda Kim chronicles Paik’s work from his early development in Berlin up to his eventual return to Korea in the 1980s.
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Film Review: The Eight Mountains
★★★★★ During a summer break to a remote village in the Italian Alps, Pietro forges a lifelong friendship with the only other boy among the settlement’s dwindling population. Husband-wife team Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains is a gorgeously-told fable of platonic love.
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Film Review: Plan 75
★★★★☆ Amidst the most rapidly-ageing population in the world and following a string of violent attacks against the elderly, the Japanese legislature passes a bill to legalise assisted suicide over the age of 75. Hayakawa Chie’s debut feature is an emotionally nuanced human drama as well as an accomplished study of the banality of evil.
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Hot Docs 2023: Nathan-ism review
★★★☆☆ Serving in the aftermath of the Second World War, Nathan Hilu was assigned as a guard at the Nuremberg war trials. After he left the army, Hilu discovered art as a way of expressing himself and telling his story, earning a career as an illustrator in New York.
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Film Review: Return to Seoul
★★★★★ Returning to South Korea after being adopted in France as a baby, Freddie (Park Ji-min) embarks on an epic journey of self discovery and reinvention. His third feature, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is a visceral, astonishingly assured work, compelling, rarely predictable, and vital.
