Reviews
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Film Review: Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
★★★★☆ Celeste Bell reassembles her mother’s life, reclaims her image and recalls their own troubled relationship in Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché. Co-directed with Paul Sng, it is an affecting, delicately balanced documentary of conflictual opposites, mental trauma and loss, which seeks understanding and ultimately a peaceful final resting place. I Am a Cliché…
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Film Review: Notturno
★★★★☆ All the world’s a stage for veteran documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi. Notturno, his latest piece of deeply humanist cinematic theatre, concerns itself with the aftermath of the military coups, authoritarianism and foreign imperialism that have plagued the Middle East since World War One and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Those without a detailed…
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Film Review: Justine
★★☆☆☆ British director Jamie Patterson’s latest film follows the eponymous Justine (Tallulah Haddon) a young malcontent living in Brighton. Opening as she is awoken from a drunken slumber by her angry landlord demanding rent, we follow Justine through the preceding two months of her life. It’s always a bit of a tell when a film…
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Film Review: The Dissident
★★★★☆ Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist at the time working for the Washington Post, was assassinated on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Released in the week where the international community finally admitted the Saudi Crown Prince’s involvement, Bryan Fogel’s new documentary painstakingly – and painfully – traces the moments up…
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Film Review: IWOW: I Walk on Water
★★★★☆ Khalik Allah’s IWOW: I Walk on Water is an ambitious, bewildering stream of consciousness; visual, aural, even ethereal. A film that looks past first impressions, and stops, taking the time to listen and learn about faces, places and stories too easily disregarded, it purposefully eschews any kind of generic classification or simple payoff. With…
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Film Review: White Colour Black
★★★☆☆ More than four years after it premiered at the 2016 London Film Festival, British-Nigerian director Joseph A. Adesunloye’s feature debut finally sees the light of day. A languorous journey into social disaffection and familial rediscovery, White Colour Black’s long-awaited release is well deserved, featuring an understated central turn from the talented Dudley O’Shaughnessy. Leke…
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Film Review: Slalom
★★★★☆ French filmmaker Charlène Favier explores a sexually abusive relationship between a talented young skier and her predatory coach in Slalom. Directed with both sensitivity and brio, this gripping and haunting drama gets to the heart of the power that abusers hold over their victims. In the wake of the publication of Camille Kouchner’s (daughter…
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Film Review: PVT Chat
★★★★☆ Musician and filmmaker Ben Hozie tends to make films about New York’s more bohemian personalities. From documentary shorts about painters who use their own bed as a studio, to fiction films about philosophy-addled art terrorists, his is the demi-monde of unknown artists and free-thinking outcasts who might just be inching towards madness and getting…
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Film Review: Simple Passion
★★★★☆ Since September, Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) tells us, she has thought about nothing but a man she can’t have. “I kept working, I went to movies, I did the shopping, I read. But everything I did seemed to be cut off from reality”. In sensual romantic drama Simple Passion, Lebanese-born director Danielle Arbid captures viscerally…
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Film Review: A Glitch in the Matrix
★☆☆☆☆ Twenty-two years after the release of The Matrix, documentarian Rodney Ascher examines the question of whether we can ever really know what’s real in this incurious and intellectually questionable documentary. Ascher’s previous films – The Shining-inspired Room 237 and his somnambulant Nightmare among them – have always had an element of the paranoid and…