★★★★★ Matthew Heineman, best-known for his acclaimed documentaries Cartel Land and City of Ghosts, seamlessly makes the transition to fiction with the utterly absorbing and emotionally searing Marie Colvin drama A Private War. Anchored by a career-best performance from Rosamund Pike and flawless direction and storytelling by Heineman, A Private War Continue Reading
★★★★☆ When historians look back at the rise of populism and anti-establishment feeling in the early years of the 21st century, they will almost certainly ascribe it to two central events. The first is the Iraq War, and the loss of faith it engendered in the West’s moral standing and Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Director Wash Westmoreland’s latest film, based on a screenplay written jointly by himself, his late husband Richard Glatzer and British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, tells the timely story of the early 20th century female writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley). Plucked from her comfortable but sheltered countryside existence by pompous Parisian Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Often compared in his distinctly Japanese minimalism to legendary compatriot Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda is a filmmaker whose graceful yet unfussy style contrasts with the knotty themes he has made it his trademark to tackle. Kore-eda’s films are dedicated to the dilemmas and tragedies of family life, from the loss Continue Reading
★★★★★ Primarily centred around New York auction houses, art fairs and the colourful characters that frequent them, Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything certainly doesn’t hold back in its skewering of a contemporary art world defined far more by financial gain and status seeking than a genuine love of beauty. Continue Reading
★★★★☆ There is a ruined church that appears twice in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War: once at the beginning and once at the end, which serves as an authentic counterpoint to the fake heritage the new communist government is trying to create. Lacking a roof and strewn with rubble, it nonetheless feels Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Filmed in two separate parts by Terence Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives explores his childhood and early adulthood in the Liverpool of the 1940s and 1950s through the characters of Tony (Dean Williams), his authoritarian father Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite), loving mother (Freda Dowie) and lively sisters Eileen (Angela Walsh) Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Best-known for Of Gods And Men, a film about a group of lonely men in a monastery at a time of political conflict, Xavier Beauvois is back with The Guardians, a film about a group of lonely women on a farm at a time of political conflict. Jokes about Continue Reading
★★★★☆ This modest but polished film follows an older woman’s journey of self-discovery as her partner is sent to jail. Set in the Paraguayan capital city of Asunción, Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses opens as the vivacious Chiquita (Margarita Irún) finds out she has been sentenced to prison for unpaid debts. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was a masterclass in direction, cinematography, sound design and dramatic tension. This year’s sequel Sicario 2: Soldado, directed by Italian crime-thriller veteran Stefano Sollima, is a solid but less memorable effort. Despite its big-name cast and eventful narrative, the original film had a distinctly art-house touch Continue Reading
★★★★★ British director Andrew Haigh follows up the brilliant 45 Years and Weekend with another understated masterpiece, Lean on Pete, about a young man’s odyssey across America with his horse. Haigh demonstrates impressive versatility by moving from a drama about the collapsing marriage of a middle-class retired couple in genteel Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, In the Fog, Maidan) returns to fiction filmmaking with A Gentle Creature: a gloomy, timely tale of a nameless woman trying to track down her incarcerated husband in remote rural Russia. Since his last fictional work with In the Fog, Loznitsa has directed a slew Continue Reading
★★★★★ New Year celebrations have only recently been and gone, but it may well prove difficult to find a more perfect film than Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018. That shouldn’t come as a surprise from a director behind two of the great film masterpieces of the 21st century Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The First World War might be overshadowed in the contemporary mind by its more famous sequel, but in some ways it is of greater historical importance. It destroyed once and for all the possibility of a heroic conception of war, which simply could not be reconciled with the brutal Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Jennifer Peedom’s Mountain contains some truly breathtaking imagery, but it reduces the sublime wonders of the peaks to mere daredevilry. In this collaboration between Peedom – whose previous Bafta-nominated effort Sherpa explored similar territory – and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, dramatic footage of climbers, skiers, mountain bikers and base Continue Reading