Reviews
-
Film Review: Holy Spider
★★★☆☆ Five years on from his neo-Scandi fairytale Border, Ali Abbasi returns with a noirish serial killer thriller. As we have come to expect from the Iranian-born director, Holy Spider combines genre thrills with social commentary, though its balance isn’t quite as finely tuned as much of his previous work.
-
Film Review: Nascondino (Hide & Seek)
★★★★☆ In UK cinemas now following a successful festival run, Victoria Fiore’s Nascondino (or Hide & Seek to give it its English title) is a heart-breaking, naturalistic study of 10-year-old Entoni as he grows up in the Spanish quarter of Naples, an area where organised crime is endemic.
-
Film Review: A Rising Fury
★★★☆☆ Encompassing the years leading up to the war in Ukraine, Ruslan Batytskyi and Lesya Kalynska’s debut feature is a worthy study of one man’s journey from the Maidan Square Revolution to the current conflict. A Rising Fury documents the life of one of many thousands caught up in Putin’s war.
-
Film Review: Enys Men
★★★★★ Following his acclaimed feature debut Bait, Cornish-born director Mark Jenkin returns with a haunting, enigmatic folk horror. Whereas Bait was a lament for a way of life swallowed up by mindless urbanite tourism, Enys Men is a hymn to sublime, endless time and the hauntedness of existence.
-
Film Review: Tár
★★★★★ It takes a certain bravery, on the part of a filmmaker, to put their own creative instincts on screen up against the grandeur of a gold-plated masterpiece. But so it is in Tár, where an imagined maestro on the podium of the Berlin philharmonic grapples with Mahler’s Fifth, battling everyone from the orchestra itself to…
-
Film Review: Alcarràs
★★★★☆ The livelihoods of three generations of Catalonian peach farmers come under threat when a developer tries to evict the family from the land they have spent their lives farming. Director Carla Simón’s Alcarràs is at once a paean to family, community and a dwindling way of life, and a complex and heartbreaking study of…
-
Film Review: Peter von Kant
★★★☆☆ François Ozon remakes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Sumptuously shot and compellingly performed, this worthy remake of the celebrated original is a handsome work in its own right and is an affectionate tribute to its German predecessor.
-
Film Review: Corsage
★★★★☆ Royalty. Can’t live with them. Can’t stop making films about them. If it isn’t The Queen or the Netflix series The Crown, it’s Spencer. And now Marie Kreutzer’s new film Corsage puts on the crown with a spirited and witty take on Empress Elisabeth of Austria – better known in Europe as Sissi.
-
Film Review: Avatar: The Way of Water
★★☆☆☆ Thirteen years after James Cameron’s long-awaited return with 2009’s Avatar, here comes James Cameron’s second long-awaited return with Avatar: The Way of Water. The franchise opener was a global phenomenon, smashing box office records and ushering in a new era of 3D filmmaking.
-
Film Review: Mr. Bachmann and His Class
★★★★☆ Shot over the course of a school year, Maria Speth’s sixth feature captures the lives of a class of German 14-year-olds. At almost four hours in length, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is long, but its enormous characters and emotions more than fill the space, headed by an astonishingly charismatic teacher.