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...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Christopher Machell.
3 May 2024
Film Review: Challengers
★★★★☆ 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.
24 April 2024
Film Review: Abigail
★★☆☆☆ 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.
17 April 2024
Film Review: Civil War
★★★★☆ 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.
Christopher Machell
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...
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...
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,...
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...
Film Review: Colour Out of Space
★★★☆☆ An adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space, filmmaker Richard Stanley’s latest is a richly textured, if not entirely...
Film Review: Little Joe
★★★★☆ In her sixth feature, Austrian director Jessica Hausner brings an intense, minimalistic creepiness to this science fiction tale of floral manipulation. Read as...
Adaptations: Post-war anxiety in Hitchcock’s The Birds
Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds was published in 1952 in her collection The Apple Tree. Telling the story of a Cornish village...
