Reviews
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Film Review: Now, Voyager
★★★★☆ 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 to UK…
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Film Review: The Fever
★★★★★ The shadow of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who once compared the indigenous people of Brazil as animals living in a zoo and whose policies have accelerated the decimation of the Amazon rainforest, hangs over veteran documentarian Maya Da-Rin’s first fiction feature like a sickness. Da-Rin’s documentary credentials bring an authenticity that avoids easy…
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Film Review: The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
★★★★☆ In 1971, 15-year-old Swede Björn Andrésen shot to fame after he was cast as the youthful Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. Dubbed by Visconti as “the most beautiful boy in the world”, Andrésen became an overnight worldwide sensation and, through the lens of documentarians Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, an object lesson…
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Film Review: Limbo
★★★★☆ 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, this time…
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Film Review: The World to Come
★★★☆☆ Schoharie County, the upstate New York setting of Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, takes its name from a Mohawk word meaning ‘floating driftwood’. It’s an apt starting point from which to view the Norwegian director’s sophomore feature, the term keys into the restless stasis of a film – and its central pairing –…
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Film Review: Riders of Justice
★★★★☆ The old saying goes that a problem shared is a problem halved. The maths of this is not an exact science in Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice, but an unlikely band of misfit brothers in arms – a soldier, hacker, statistician and IT whiz – unite to avenge the brutal violence of a…
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Film Review: Old
★★★★☆ The films of M. Night Shyamalan need little by way of an introduction. In the two decades since The Sixth Sense rocketed to the top of the US box office and made his reputation as a masterful deployer of final-act plot twists, his films have had their ups and downs in their treatment by critics…
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Film Review: Night of the Kings
★★★★☆ A fusion of storytelling, dance, song and mythology, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings forms a rich, beguiling narrative web. Channelling the gifts of a traditional West African griot, the Ivory Coast filmmaker uses oral histories passed down by the generations to draw upon his nation’s past, to both preserve it and employ its…
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Film Review: Summer of Soul
★★★★★ Recalling the moment she walked out on stage and looked upon the assembled crowd of thousands at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, Mavis Staples remembers being “overcome with joy.” The experience of watching Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) achieves similar levels of pure elation,…
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Film Review: Nowhere Special
★★★★☆ “This is the most important decision of my life”, single father John (James Norton) pleads to his social worker. “How will I know if I’ve got it right?” The decision in question, and the premise of Italian director Uberto Pasolini’s latest film Nowhere Special, is who will adopt John’s son, Michael (Daniel Lamont) after…