Festivals
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SXSW 2022: Raquel 1:1 review
★★★☆☆ How do we balance modern faith with the often unsavoury legacies of religion, and how are those legacies used to excuse immoral behaviour in the present? Filmmaker Mariana Bastos gestures at these questions in her second feature (her first as solo director), a compelling magical realist drama.
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SXSW 2022: Me Little Me review
★★★☆☆ In her debut feature, Canadian filmmaker Elizabeth Ayiku has a crafted a thoughtful and tender drama. Marshalling an excellent performance from A’Keyah Dasia Williams as protagonist Mya, Me Little Me is moving, if a little disjointed in its construction.
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SXSW 2022: Bitch Ass review
★★☆☆☆ Bill Posley’s debut feature sees its world premiere at this year’s festival. With its stylistic flourishes, one eye on social commentary and a solid genre premise, Bitch Ass shows potential for the writer-actor turned director.
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#LFF 2021: Paris, 13th District review
★★☆☆☆ Told in a loose beginning, middle and end, Jacques Audiard’s criss-crossing Paris, 13th District revolves principally between the film’s three central characters: Émilie (Lucie Zhang), Camille (Makita Samba) and Nora (Noémie Merlant).
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#LFF 2021: ear for eye review
★★★★★ A visionary crossover of the theatrical and the cinematic, ear for eye demonstrates writer-director debbie tucker green’s remarkable creative versatility and clarity of expression.
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#LFF 2021: Inexorable review
★★★★☆ Fabrice Du Welz’s sixth film Inexorable continues to explore his fascination with troubled souls. Here, it’s a young woman on a mission to destroy an author and his upper-class wife, for reasons which are kept tantalisingly opaque.
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#LFF 2021: The Medium review
★★★★☆ From celebrated South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-Jin, The Medium is an occult shocker set in an isolated village in northern Thailand. A tropical (and therefore suitably febrile) take on the demonic possession and found-footage sub-genres, its creepy theatrics build to a freaky climax.
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#LFF 2021: Programme preview
Contrary to the doom and gloom in certain editorial circles, cinema is well and truly back. Ignoring the clickbait and released back into the wild, the BFI London Film Festival returns to – dare we say it – some sense of normality for 2021.
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FrightFest 2021: Evie review
★★☆☆☆ Emmerdale actor Dominic Brunt moonlights as a horror filmmaker. Evie, his fourth time on bullhorn duties, co-directed with Jamie Lundy, is based on the Celtic and Norse myth of the selkie, a derivative of the better-known mermaid. For Brunt, Evie is both a step up and a step back. Its gloomy beach-set scenes are atmospheric and rugged.…
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FrightFest 2021: Knocking review
★★★★☆ A middle-aged woman, released from a psychiatric facility, moves into a block of flats. Settling in and finding her feet again, one night she begins to hear a thumping sound. Nobody else hears it. Is she going mad or is she on to something? The fictional feature debut of Swedish documentary filmmaker Frida Kempff, Knocking is…
