Tom Duggins
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Film Review: Vox Lux
★★☆☆☆ 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 poised for something truly special.…
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Film Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
★★★★★ 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 her own expression, but not…
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Film Review: Stan & Ollie
★★★★☆ 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 magic, a natural chemistry that…
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Film Review: The Last Movie
★★★☆☆ 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 Rider: a film which proved…
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Film Review: Becoming Animal
★★★★☆ 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 nature is, by definition, a…
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Film Review: An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
★☆☆☆☆ 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 and suddenly shouting non-sequiturs silly?…
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Film Review: Mandy
★★★★★ 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 Cosmatos. His debut feature film…
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Film Review: Venom
★★☆☆☆ 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 guys, Sony have taken a…
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Interview: Johanna St Michaels, dir. The Inertia Variations
Johanna St Michaels is a writer and director whose films Penthouse North and The Islands Amid The World explore the effects of time on people and places that slowly become neglected. Her latest film, The Inertia Variations, is her most personal to date.
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Interview: François Ozon, dir. L’Amant Double
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.