Reviews
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Film Review: Next Door
★★★★☆ Spanish-German actor Daniel Brühl makes his directorial debut with this delightfully taut, blackly comic satire. Brühl is perhaps best-known to a global audience as the all-seeing, all-scheming Marvel villain Helmut Zemo, but Next Door upends Brühl’s signature cool-headedness by placing his hapless actor Daniel at the mercy of determined and vengeful neighbour, Bruno (Peter…
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Film Review: No Time to Die
★★★★☆ 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 be a…
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Film Review: Balloon
★★★★★ Pre-eminent Tibetan director Pema Tseden returns to screens with his latest, finally released in the UK after premiering at the Venice Film Festival two years ago. Balloon is a poetic, bleak, funny, and deeply humane portrait of life in rural Tibet. In the early 1980s, Drolkar (Sonam Wangmo), lives in the mountains with husband…
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Film Review: The Alpinist
★★★★☆ Filmmaking partners Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, known for their extensive documentary work on climbing and for their Reel Rock Film Tour films, set their sights on Marc-André Leclerc, a legend in the climbing world living in relative obscurity. The Alpinist is a portrait of a disarmingly awkward and charming young man, driven to…
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Film Review: The Story of Looking
★★★★☆ In the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, prolific director and cinephile Mark Cousins adapts his book of the same name into a visual study of the art of looking at the world. Cousins’ films are always personal, but underpinned by his imminent cataract surgery, The Story of Looking is among his most deeply felt.…
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Film Review: Rose Plays Julie
★★★★★ In Rose Plays Julie, the latest from dynamic duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, a child of adoption studying veterinary medicine decides to seek out her biological mother and father. Her journey of discovery and resolution in holding her parents to account makes for haunting viewing. With their regular collaborator Aidan Gillen, Molloy and…
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Film Review: Prisoners of the Ghostland
★★★☆☆ Sion Sono’s debut film in the English language is an East-meets-West genre medley centred on the hero monomyth, and crucially the samurai movie’s influence on both the modern western and post-apocalyptic actioner. Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage gets to do his thing, and that’s always welcome. Prisoners of the Ghostland is an oddball movie that leaves…
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Film Review: Herself
★★★★☆ 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 realism will…
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Film Review: The Servant
★★★★★ The first in a trilogy of Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey collaborations that also includes Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970) and re-released this week in glorious 4K, The Servant (1963) is a tense psychological drama that studies the theme of servitude, whilst also offering a brutal indictment of the British class system. James Fox stars as Tony, a wealthy…
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Film Review: The Lost Leonardo
★★★★☆ Ten years ago, London’s National Gallery exhibited a heavily restored Salvator Mundi, allegedly painted by Leonardo da Vinci, the attribution of which is fiercely contested. Tracing the painting from discovery to its eventual record-breaking private sale, documentarian Andreas Koefoed’s latest is about how art can become a vector for vanity, status and raw power.…