Category: Joseph Walsh
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Film Review: Vita & Virginia
★★☆☆☆ Compared to many authors, Virginia Woolf has fared relatively well on screen. Eileen Atkins’ one-woman stage show, A Room of One’s Own, that was later filmed for TV, was terrific. Then back in 2002, Nicole Kidman gave an Oscar-winning performance in The Hours (the prosthetic nose that aided her has sadly yet to be…
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Film Review: Only You
★★★☆☆ IVF remains a rarely discussed topic in cinema, even though millions of people go through it each year, which makes Harry Wootliff’s debut feature, Only You, all the more refreshing. It all begins, as many romantic dramas do, with a meet-cute. One New Year’s Eve in Glasgow, Jake (Josh O’Connor) a part-time DJ and…
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Film Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp
★★★★☆ Bring It On director Peyton Reed returns with Marvel sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, a heartfelt family comedy in which the peril lies in a father-daughter plot, rather than the fate of the universe. One of the joys of the Ant-Man movies is its protagonist, Scott Lang, (Paul Rudd). Unlike Black Panther who is…
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Film Review: Leave No Trace
★★★★★ Eight years on from Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik offers up Leave No Trace starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, an intricately crafted and haunting drama, based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock. “Your socks burned you,” scolds Will (Foster) when he discovers his daughter, Tom, hiding in the undergrowth of a…
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Film Review: Whitney
★★★★☆ One year on from the release of Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me, Kevin MacDonald’s Whitney proves that there is always room for another documentary on the pop music icon. With access to close family and friends, MacDonald’s emotional documentary seeks to unearth just how one of the world’s greatest singers came to…
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Film Review: Girl
★★★★★ Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont makes his directorial debut with Girl, a sympathetic and emotionally rich portrait of a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who has aspirations of one day becoming a ballet dancer. Taking on the role of Lara is cisgender actor Victor Polster. A trained dancer, Polster offers a…
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Film Review: Arctic
★★★☆☆ With Arctic, Brazilian director Joe Penna’s debut feature offers audiences a conventional survival thriller of one man pitted against nature, which still manages to deliver the occasional moment of raw tension. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Overgård, a Danish explorer who is forced to crash-land his aircraft in the middle of the arctic tundra. He…
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Cannes 2018: Rafiki review
★★★☆☆ The Kenyan government had already banned Wanuri Kahiu’s second feature, Rafiki, before it even premiered in Cannes. Telling the story of a pair of young women who fall in love only to be ostracised by their local community, the government feared it would “promote lesbianism” which remains illegal in Kenya. All of which has…
