Reviews
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Film Review: Santos – Skin to Skin
★★★☆☆ Afro-Latin percussionist and multiple Grammy award nominee John Santos is the worthy subject of filmmaker Kathryn Golden’s first feature-length documentary, a lively and often compelling portrait of the man and his music.
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Film Review: Benedetta
★★★★☆ Based on the life of 17th century nun Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) who enters into a relationship with fellow nun Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), Benedetta has all the religious symbolism, violence and nudity that we have come to expect from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven.
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Film Review: The Northman
★★★☆☆ Based on the Norse myth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Robert Eggers’ third film is a rollocking, rampaging Viking romp. The Northman is Eggers’ most ambitious project to date, but for all its howling spectacle and ultra-violent elemental machismo it is also his least successful.
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Film Review: Operation Mincemeat
★★★☆☆ In the early 1940s, with the world at war and Europe hopelessly divided, everyone was writing a spy story. Or at least, that’s what Operation Mincemeat will have you believe: a true tale of ingenious falsehood, where the boundaries between espionage and paperback fiction begin to blur.
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Film Review: Prayers for the Stolen
★★★★★ In a remote rural Mexican village a war wages between a drug cartel and the authorities. The villagers are inevitably caught up in the middle, their lives eroded and destroyed in unimaginable ways. Tatiana Huezo’s narrative debut is a harrowing account of lives held hostage by exterior forces.
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Film Review: Small Body
★★★★☆ Agata (Celeste Cescutti) is a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn child. She lives on the coast of Veneto in North East Italy in a deeply religious community where the priest assures her that the unbaptised baby is now in limbo where she will stay for eternity.
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Film Review: Compartment No. 6
★★★★☆ Compartment No. 6 is a love story deeper and more affecting than any conventional meet-cute. Setting his film largely on the dingy confines of an overnight train, Kuosmanen kindles a tender love story between two lost souls.
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Film Review: A Night of Knowing Nothing
★★★★☆ Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s debut feature A Night of Knowing Nothing blends documentary and narrative fiction to examine political activism, rebellion and cinephilia under the right-wing rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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Film Review: The Worst Person in the World
★★★★☆ Finding your way in the postmodern world isn’t always easy. The answers might be different but the questions are perennial. Do I settle down or play the field? Am I looking for a soulmate or adventure? What do I do with my life? These are the themes tackled in Joachim Trier’s latest.
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Film Review: Escape from Mogadishu
★★★★☆ Ryu Seung-wan is a veteran of this kind of picture – his previous film, The Battleship Island, had a similar ‘escape from’ premise in a period setting – so it’s no surprise that Escape from Mogadishu is a rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.