Film reviews and more
To say that Bong Joon-ho’s latest film, Parasite, is attracting attention ahead of its UK release in February would be something of an understatement. Having already topped many end-of-year lists in territories blessed with an earlier […]
★★★★☆ Back in 2015, Robert Eggers delighted critics with the flesh-pecking horror of The Witch, a directorial feature debut which blended the theatrics of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with shades of M. Night Shyamalan and the […]
★★★★☆ 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, […]
★★★★☆ 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, […]
Alison Klayman made her name as a film-maker with 2012’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a close study of the revered Chinese artist which followed him across the course of several years, leading up to his eventual […]
★★★★★ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ 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 […]
★★☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★★ 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 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 […]
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★☆☆☆☆ 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 […]
★★★★★ 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 – […]
★★☆☆☆ 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 […]