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.
★★☆☆☆ Best-known as Ryan from The Office: An American Workplace, B.J. Novak makes his feature directorial debut with this passable comedy thriller. Tinged with late-90s neo-noir vibes, Vengeance is an entertaining enough 100 minutes or so that more or less meet their modest if uninspiring ambitions.
★★★☆☆ In his debut feature, director Chad Murdock explores the ways that memory and selfhood intersect in this enigmatic, personal drama. In its surreal rendering of space and character, Fingers in the Wind offers enough ambition, intelligence and unvarnished authenticity to warrant recommendation.
★★★☆☆ British director Peter Strickland returns to screens with his fifth feature, a typically bizarre black comedy. Strickland’s signature dish of fetishism, Argento-esque horror, and British idiosyncrasy is served piping hot, even though Flux Gourmet sadly lacks something of the bite of his previous work.
★★★★★ After debuting at Cannes last year, celebrated Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s In Front of Your Face arrives on UK screens. A typically minimalist outing, director Hong’s film is a devastating drama whose affect creeps up on the audience so quietly that it is barely noticeable until after the final blow has landed.
★★★★☆ Aspiring comic artist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) has just graduated from high school with long-suffering friend Miles (Miles Emanuel). After witnessing the death of his esteemed, unconventional art teacher, Robert leaves home, gets a job and sets out to make his name as an artist in this idiosyncratic, unsettling and very funny coming-of-age story.
★★☆☆☆ Television director Tom George makes the leap to big screen features with quirky 1950s-set whodunnit See How They Run. Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell head a cast of international stars and British TV alumni, but sadly charismatic turns from the likeable leads rarely detract from a shallow archness to proceedings.
★★☆☆☆ Have you ever wondered who would win in a fight between Idris Elba and an enraged African lion? Well wonder no more, dear reader, as Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur is here to answer one of the question of the ages with Beast, an entertaining-enough survival romp that at only 90 minutes long feels oddly slack.
★★★★☆ Jordan Peele reunites with Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya for his third film, Nope, a typically tense, frightening and frequently funny reinvention of the flying saucer B-movie. While its social satire is perhaps not as sharp as Get Out, nor its scares as creepy as Us, Nope is nevertheless another triumph from Peele.
