★★☆☆☆ 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
Johanna St Michaels is a writer and director whose films Penthouse North (2014) and The Islands Amid The World (2011) explore the effects of time on people and places that slowly become neglected. Her latest film, The Inertia Variations (2017), is her most personal to date, taking as its subject Continue Reading
The French director François Ozon is no beginner when it comes to tackling eroticism on film. His output during the 2010s has included two explorations of female sexuality – 2013’s Young and Beautiful and 2014’s The New Girlfriend. Now he returns with a third, the erotic thriller L’Amant Double. We caught Continue Reading
Xavier Legrand is an actor and director whose Just Before Losing Everything was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. His first feature Custody, a powerful film which explores the anguish and anxiety caused by a violent father, won the Silver Lion at Venice last year. We Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ James Crump’s latest documentary explores the coterie of artists, models and writers who formed around the pioneering fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez. A passionate and romantic figure, Lopez makes for a dynamic subject in a film sadly lacking in narrative excitement. Working alongside his creative partner, Juan Eugene Ramos, Lopez Continue Reading
★★★★★ Swedish writer and director Ruben Östlund offers up another skin-crawling, hilarious study of the male ego battling against its own lack of self-awareness with The Square, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure won great acclaim for its deliciously awkward portrayal Continue Reading
James Erskine is an accomplished director and documentarian who has explored a number of different sporting greats through the medium of film. His latest, The Ice King, tells the life story of John Curry: a pioneer in the world of figure skating, who redefined the sport by incorporating elements of Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The breakdown of a marriage is the stuff of many a taught, uncomfortable drama, and Loveless – the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev – offers a superbly icy portrait of a disintegrating relationship and the intolerable strain that places on the couple’s only child. Zvyagintsev’s previous film, Continue Reading
