Reviews
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Film Review: Frankie
★★☆☆☆ A family assemble for a vacation in Portugal and to confront a looming loss in Ira Sachs’ gentle talkathon, Frankie. The film takes place in the Portuguese city of Sinta, a beautiful location, and a family of disparate elements have gathered here to swim, eat and walk, but mainly to chat – and chat some…
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Film Review: Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In
★★★★☆ “Football, bloody hell!” Taciturn, but never a man to mince his words, only occasionally did the inscrutable exterior of Sir Alex Ferguson – one of football’s most fearsome managers – ever crack a smile. Directed by his son Jason, documentary memoir Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In builds to the dreamlike conclusion of the…
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Film Review: Surge
★★★☆☆ Finding Ben Whishaw at his most electric and engrossing best, Surge sees an airport security official a long way past the end of his rope and on a collision course with disaster. Aneil Karia’s debut feature is (intentionally) uncomfortable viewing from first to last, reminiscent in its apparent aims and mood as the Safdie…
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Film Review: The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
★★★★★ It seems ridiculous to call a film that is only 73-minutes long an epic, but that is what The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet feels like. Though it should be made clear, by epic there’s nothing grandiose; there is nary a special effect to be seen and hardly a cast of thousands. But at…
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Film Review: Army of the Dead
★★★☆☆ Is there currently a more divisive director than Zack Snyder? On one side there are the legions of fans and hashtag warriors for who he is a messianic figure of unsurpassed vision. Facing them, the hordes who find his overwrought, bombastic fantasies puerile and utterly vacuous, slowed down to interminable lengths by almost constant…
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Film Review: Sound of Metal
★★★★☆ Darius Marder’s first directing credit since 2008’s documentary, Loot, Sound of Metal is an astonishing accomplishment for both its long-nascent director and its British star, Riz Ahmed, for whom his turn as heavy metal drummer Ruben represents a career-best performance. Seemingly as at home with American-led blockbusters as he is with British indie cinema,…
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Film Review: Nomadland
★★★★★ Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the Oscar and Bafta-winning Nomadland is writer and director Chloé Zhao’s third feature-length film and is a beautiful and compassionate portrait of people living on the outskirts of American society. In 2011, after the economy collapsed, it leaves the rural town…
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Film Review: Minari
★★★★☆ Having charmed audiences at Sundance over a year ago, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari finally makes its way to UK screens. Drawing on his own South Korean heritage, and experience of growing up in rural Arkansas, the director’s poignant, very personal fifth feature was selected as the Opening Night feature of the 2021 Glasgow Film…
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Film Review: Apples
★★★★☆ “It’s the end of the line,” says a bus driver as he wakes a man who has fallen asleep on his route. Where was his stop? Does he not remember his name? Opening with an end, a journey unfinished, is the departure point for Christos Nikou’s cyclical meditation on memory, grief and new beginnings…
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Film Review: Black Bear
★★★★☆ Led by a tour de force performance as savage, unpredictable and frightening as the film’s titular ursine, Black Bear stars Aubrey Plaza in stellar form as a writer-director seeking inspiration, in this bamboozling psychological character study. Art appears to imitate and draw upon life in Lawrence Michael Levine’s head-scratching, emotionally fraught follow-up to 2014’s…