Reviews
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Film Review: Pieces of a Woman
★★☆☆☆ Cinema’s unique facility to connect image, sound and narrative gives it a special power: there is not a medium that can portray the vast spectrum of emotional experience with the immediacy that films can. Perhaps this is why cinematic trauma has such visceral capacity to shock us. For one scene, and one scene only,…
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Film Review: Sing Me a Song
★★☆☆☆ Eight-year-old Peyangki lives in Bhutan, in one of the of the remotest villages in the world. As he trains diligently to become a Buddhist monk, the imminent arrival of electricity in the village and a proper road to the city promises progress and anxiety in equal measure. Ten years later, Peyangki is now eighteen…
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Film Review: Soul
★★★☆☆ In his fourth Pixar feature, director Pete Docter grapples with matters of life and death to interrogate definitions of earthly success. Soul is certainly head and shoulders above the studio’s directionless last effort, Onward, but its lofty aspirations never reach the transcendence of top-tier Pixar. Joe (Jamie Foxx) is an aspiring jazz musician, stuck…
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Film Review: Wonder Woman 1984
★★★☆☆ It’s nearly seventy years after Diana of Themyscira aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) saved the world from the ravages of war. Now, among the day-glo leotards and crisp white leg warmers of the 1980s, her biggest fight is the conflict between her desires and her duty. Remember when DC’s answer to the colour and…
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Film Review: Farewell Amor
★★★☆☆ Bookmarked by static long takes of three people, firstly in the immensity of JFK’s arrivals hall and then a cramped, one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, there is a wonderful balance to the construction of Farewell Amor. Between these intimate moments, Ekwa Msangi takes us full circle with the story of the difficulties faced by an Angolan family reunited in…
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Film Review: The Mole Agent
★★★☆☆ The fear of old age’s erosion of our faculties, our agency and our relevance is a potent, almost paralysing one: the way we perceive and treat our elders invariably reveals something about ourselves. In her charming and off-kilter documentary The Mole Agent, Chilean director Maite Alberdi confronts that fear literally through the eyes of…
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Film Review: Il Mio Corpo
★★★★☆ “Memories fill the heart, but they shouldn’t hold back the future. You always have to stay positive.” Though this sage, admirably optimistic counsel is well-meaning, it defies the harsh reality of Sicilian life presented in Michele Pennetta’s contemplative quasi-documentary Il Mio Corpo. That this advice is given by a priest to a young man embarking…
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Film Review: Crock of Gold
★★★★☆ Visually striking and audibly arresting from its opening number until the curtain comes down, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is an affectionate paean to its irascible, impudent frontman. Just as The Pogues’ creative force and lead singer could “hear the colours and see the sounds” of his beloved Tipperary fields,…
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Film Review: Mank
★★★★☆ “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” So claims screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz on the circular narrative of his magnum opus. In a little over the two-hour mark, David Fincher’s luscious, elliptical and elusive Mank – from a script by his…
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Film Review: Host
★★★★☆ Following its debut on Shudder earlier this year, Rob Savage’s sensational tech-horror hit gets a much-deserved wide release. Conceived, written, shot and released all in the early months of the Covid crisis and taking place entirely on a Zoom call, Host is about as contemporary – and chilling – as it gets. In the…