Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ Mid-way through Jacques Audiard’s criss-crossing critique of modern city life in Paris, 13th District, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) – out of work and in need of cash – is showing a prospective tenant around the apartment in which she lives. Part of the deal for this unsuspecting newcomer is that she will need to […]
★★★★★ A rich, autumnal gem of a film, Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman effortlessly blends reality with fairytale, past with present, to explore notions of loss, grief and acceptance. At just 72 minutes, it is short and sweet, but yet another exquisitely made, deeply moving feature from the French writer-director. The film opens with […]
★★★★★ 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. Hitting the big screens of the London Film Festival and small screens of the BBC simultaneously, this fervent, eloquent work articulates the shared experiences and personal history of […]
★★★★☆ All that glitters is not gold, but there is positivity to be found in radioactivity. Co-directed by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, the haunting supernatural forces at work in Never Gonna Snow Again are elusive, inexplicable and yet perfectly in sync with reality. They enter and alter the world in which they […]
★★★★☆ Does a filmmaker use cinema as his or her own confessional booth or a darkened space in which to escape the harsh realities of the outside world? When the curtain closes and the lights go down on Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, it’s clear that this deeply autobiographical project is a vessel for both. […]
★★★☆☆ As fuzzy and reassuring as a multi-coloured Pringle sweater-vest, The Phantom of the Open is a good, old-fashioned crowd-pleaser. Based on a true story, it stars Mark Rylance as Maurice Flitcroft, a Barrow-in-Furness crane-operator turned novice golfer, who – on multiple occasions – blagged his way into the British Open. Earning himself […]
★★★★☆ Adapting American author Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name for the big screen, Kiwi writer-director Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is a meditative yet punishing, slow-burning exploration of man’s animal instincts. Montana, 1925. Sprawling and loosely episodic, the film maintains a chaptered structure, and we meet the brothers Burbank, Phil […]
★★★☆☆ Only viewers of a certain age will be familiar with the erratic sound of a dial-up modem firing into gear. It’s one of a whole host of pitch-perfect gags that litter new animation Ron’s Gone Wrong, a tender, frequently hilarious tale of unexpected friendships, growing self-assurance and analogue triumph in the digital age. […]
★★☆☆☆ A nostalgic, blood and rain-splattered love letter to London and all that is and has ever been good, bad and decidedly ugly about the Big Smoke, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is, surprisingly, the director’s first film to appear at LFF. Constructed with his trademark panache, it is bold, bracing and […]
★★★★☆ Radio static crackles and emergency responders report a growing number of calls. What begins as a steady stream is soon a torrent; at the Queens hospital where she works, Dr. Nathalie Dougé notes that from one or two patients displaying symptoms of a new, unknown and unpredictable virus one week, it is […]
★★★★☆ A collision of ghosts past and future haunt the present in Pablo Larraín’s Spencer. By turns insidious and caustic, claustrophobic and free-wheeling, it is a nightmarish fairy-tale where little chance of a happily-ever-after exists. Exploring the powerlessness an exasperated Diana (Kristen Stewart) must confront when faced with Windsor tradition, expectation and hypocrisy, […]
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. Conscious that many cinema lovers would still prefer to […]
★★★★☆ Out with the old and in with the new? Well, not exactly. Acutely aware of where it has been but laying the groundwork for where it may go next, No Time to Die marks a significant fork in the road for Ian Fleming’s 007. And yet as one door closes, another opens, and it will […]
★★★★☆ A Dublin-set kitchen sink drama for the modern era, Phyllida Lloyd’s strong third feature, Herself, is as much an indictment of the grinding bureaucracy failing to house and protect women abused at the hands of their partners, as it is the men who inflict such despicable physical and psychological trauma. Fans of social […]
★★★★★ “Daesh [ISIS] feel they have the right to use sabaya girls as personal slaves. To rape them and sell them.” The horrors of life for Yazidi women inside the refugee camp of Al-Hol are laid bare in Kurdish-Swedish filmmaker Hogir Horiri’s devastating documentary, Sabaya. Almost numbed by the never-ending atrocities he has […]
★★★☆☆ Ticking all of the small-town America coming-of-age drama bingo boxes, there’s a significant twist to the full house of Siân Heder’s CODA. Ruby Rossi, played by British actress Emilia Jones in a standout performance, doesn’t quite yet know who she is or what she wants from life. She wears baggy check shirts […]
★★★★☆ Travel – broadening the mind, personal horizons and a lonely woman’s perceptions of self – is one of many tonics taken by an irrepressible Bette Davis as the traumatised Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager. Irving Rapper’s 1942 film, shining in crisp, crystalline monochrome, after a 2K digital restoration by Warner Brothers, returns […]
★★★★☆ Deadpan, absurdist comedy may not seem like an obvious genre choice for a story about the cruel, grinding bureaucracy of the UK’s asylum process. But five years since the playful oddness of his debut feature, Pikadero, Ben Sharrock returns in style with Limbo. The Scottish director again demonstrates a measured human sensibility, […]