Category: Tom Duggins

★★★★☆ Now into his sixth decade as a director, Ken Loach has followed up the Palme D’Or-winning I, Daniel Blake with another hard-hitting work of social realism. Teaming up once more with regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, Sorry We Missed You offers a scathing assessment of zero-hour contracts and the damaging Continue Reading

★★★★☆ Prolific documentary maker Nick Broomfield returns with another musical project, this time choosing a more personal topic: the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Broomfield’s close friend Marianne Ihlen. “I was born,” Leonard Cohen once remarked, “with the gift of a golden voice.” Viewers of Broomfield’s new documentary Marianne & Continue Reading

★★★★★ In Alison Klayman’s new political documentary The Brink, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is accompanied around the world, from live speaking appearances to hotel meeting rooms, documenting his exploits in the year following his departure from the Trump administration. As a documentarian, Alison Klayman knows the value Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ The uniquely American phenomenon of Hooters-style sports bars provides the subject matter for Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls. More Cassavettes than Coyote Ugly, the film rarely concerns itself too deeply with the politics of such establishments, preferring instead to take a softer, human look at the lives of its Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Vox Lux is the second directorial feature from actor and filmmaker Brady Corbet. An imagined biography of a fictional pop star, the film is ambitious in its structure but only occasionally flickers into life. The very beginning of Vox Lux shows so much promise that it will have you Continue Reading

★★★★★ In her excellent adaptation of Lee Israel’s literary fraudster memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, director Marielle Heller takes viewers on a hilarious tour of New York’s memorabilia dealers, blending a mixture of heist comedy with a sensitive character study of Israel herself: “bitter as a root”, to use Continue Reading

★★★★☆ In Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie, we peek behind the curtain and into the private lives of two cinematic heroes seeing out their twilight years in a flurry of theatrical performances and bittersweet reminiscences. The dynamic of a great comedy duo is often celebrated as a piece of Continue Reading

★★★☆☆ The Last Movie, the classic “lost” film from Dennis Hopper, is a postmodern muddle containing occasional flashes of brilliance, but those moments alone can’t light-up a dated story which reeks a little too much of creative self-indulgence. As far as directorial debuts go, it doesn’t get much better than Easy Continue Reading

★★★★☆ Becoming Animal is an unusual, thought-provoking film essay which upends many tropes of wildlife photography to create a rich landscape of ideas and images. The work of philosopher David Abram gets a good read-through as filmmakers Peter Mettler and Emma Davie explore the notion of a ‘more-than-human’ world. Photographing Continue Reading

★☆☆☆☆ The Greasy Strangler director Jim Hosking’s second feature, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, tries to make a virtue out of extreme silliness and disjointed, oh-so-random plot points, but the end result is a desperately tiresome viewing experience. Do you like to, y’know, get silly? Like, putting on fright wigs Continue Reading

★★★★★ Mandy is only the second feature film from director Panos Cosmatos, but every moment of it pulses with a deranged lysergic energy that announces the arrival of a great individualist talent. Prolific is not – just yet, anyway – a word you can associate with the Italian-Canadian director Panos Continue Reading

★★☆☆☆ Intended as the first film in Sony Pictures’ wider Marvel Universe, the Tom Hardy-starring Venom is a desperately confused piece of work which has only a few compensatory pleasures to offer along the way. Not wishing to dish out another identikit offering of lycra-clad good guys and maniacal bad Continue Reading