Reviews
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Film Review: Petrov’s Flu
★★★★★ Adapted from the novel by Alexey Salnikov’s, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu is as dense and impenetrable as it is lurching, captivating and perplexing. It’s a captivating, purgatorial nightmare that describes the feverish breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society.
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Film Review: Flee
★★★★★ Flee is a thought-provoking exploration of one man’s flight from the Taliban’s tyranny in Afghanistan. Blurring traditional boundaries of documentary with rich, beautiful animation, director Jonas Poher Rasmussen has a great deal invested in telling this story.
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Film Review: The Souvenir Part II
★★★★★ Perhaps the biggest difference between The Souvenir and Part II is its shift towards comedy. Whereas the first film charted a doomed love affair, this second outing takes the aftermath of grief and the process of recovery, charting a surprisingly comic path.
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Film Review: Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
★★★★★ Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s sixth fiction feature arrives after it took his native Chad by storm last year. Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.
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Film Review: Parallel Mothers
★★★★★ “There is no silent history…no matter how much they lie to it, human history refuses to shut up”. Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.
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Film Review: Flag Day
★★☆☆☆ Returning to Cannes after the thrashing his last film, 2016’s The Last Face, received, Sean Penn is either a masochist or a recidivist and the kindest thing to say straight off the bat is that Flag Day is something of an improvement on his previous effort.
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Film Review: Nightmare Alley
★★★☆☆ The second adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, after Edmund Goulding’s 1947 big-screen version, Mexican master filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.
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Film Review: Belfast
★★★★☆ 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.
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Film Review: Mass
★★★★☆ There are no easy answers in Fran Kranz’s Mass – and perhaps no answers at all. One of the strongest debut features to have premiered at last year’s Sundance, it exhibits all of the signs of a very promising career behind the camera lie ahead for the first-time writer-director.
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Film Review: Cicada
★★★★☆ Background noise cannot be ignored in Matt Fifer and Kieran Mulcare’s exceptional debut feature Cicada. Aural triggers that recall repressed traumas are as vivid and immediate as smells or visual memories for Ben (Fifer) and Sam (Sheldon D. Brown).