Festivals
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Venice 2018: Vox Lux review
★★★★★ We’ve already had A Star Is Born here at Venice. Now, with Brady Corbet’s latest film Vox Lux, we have A Star Is Torn – a truly unique power-pop epic starring Natalie Portman as the mononymous singer Celeste, whose rise to fame is intertwined with other tragic trajectories. Corbet originally caught our attention with the…
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Venice 2018: Dragged Across Concrete review
★★☆☆☆ S. Craig Zahler falls between ever-widening stools with his brutal new crime drama Dragged Across Concrete, which might have been more representative of the viewing experience had it been called Dragged Slowly Across Concrete. Recently-released criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) returns home to find his mother hooking to pay for drugs. Meanwhile two cops, Brett…
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FrightFest 2018: What Keeps You Alive review
★★★★☆ What Keeps You Alive is not just a edge-of-your-seat style thriller, but a searing portrait into relationships, and the horror of intimacy, or of not even really knowing who it is you’re sleeping next to. Cozy idyll gives way with a (literal) thud to a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game, (and the most tense or only…
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FrightFest 2018: Summer of 84 review
★★★☆☆ A joint directorial effort between François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84 is a somewhat disappointing entry into the hallowed halls of nostalgia, following in the footsteps of Andy Muschietti’s IT update and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Formulaic, it has all of the familiar tropes in place: bike rides to an eighties…
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FrightFest 2018: The Most Assassinated Woman in the World review
★★★☆☆ The heyday of the Parisian Grand Guignol is a perfect setting for a film screening at a horror festival: holding up a mirror to the notion of the bloodthirsty audience and how implicit we are in the sadistic voyeurism of the horror genre, it can serve as a snapshot of history, but also reveal…
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Venice 2018: Suspiria review
★★★★☆ Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino doesn’t so much remake Dario Argento’s Suspiria as use the influential Italian horror movie as an incantation with which to weave his own brand of red-black magic. Berlin, 1977. The Wall is still up and members of the Red Army Faction are in jail. Bombs are…
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Venice 2018: The Mountain review
★★★☆☆ A troubled young man goes on tour with a renowned lobotomist in Rick Alverson’s wintry new work The Mountain, showing in competition at the 75th edition of the Venice International Film Festival. Andy (Tye Sheridan) lives with his father (Udo Kier) and works at the ice rink where his father teaches figure skating. He dreams…
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Venice 2018: Our picks of the festival
This Wednesday (29 August) will see the official opening of the 75th Venice Film Festival. The programme is crammed with internationally renowned directors and stars, boasting its most promising selection in years. Here are just a few of the most eagerly anticipated works on offer. First Man Damien Chazelle’s follow up to La La Land…
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Locarno 2018: Festival roundup
With the 71st Locarno Film Festival coming to a close at the weekend and the prizes awarded, our contributor John Bleasdale notes some of the highs and lows of Swiss based celebration of film. There were many strong independent and frequently eponymous women at Locarno this year. Meet Sibel, for instance, a young woman shunned…
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Locarno 2018: Golden Leopard goes to Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined
The 71st Locarno Film Festival came to a close today and the awards have been announced. The top prize was taken by Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined, a dreamlike noir about a policeman searching Singapore for missing migrant worker. Yolande Zauberman got the Jury Prize for her crushing documentary about child rape in a…