★★★★☆ Set around a vast estate on the northeast American coast, in Roger Michell’s Blackbird, a family comes together over one last weekend to say their goodbyes to matriarch Lily (Susan Sarandon). Lily has a terminal illness which causes such […]
★★★★☆ Alexandre O. Philippe continues his run of feature-length documentaries concentrated on classic genre movies, with a look at William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Often described as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, this deep dive benefits from Friedkin serving as our […]
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours by A.J. Marriot, who also featured as a consultant on the film, Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is part biography and part homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, […]
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over […]
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew […]
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip […]
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in […]
★★★☆☆ In Dennison Ramalho’s phantasmagorical morality tale The Nightshifter, a cuckolded coroner’s assistant with the ability to communicate with the recently departed takes revenge against his wife and her lover, in turn unleashing a living nightmare upon himself and his […]
★★★★☆ Down Terrace director Ben Wheatley returns to the horror of kinship with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (working title Colin You Anus), which received its world premiere at this year’s London Film Festival. The film stars Wheatley regular Neil Maskell – […]
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t […]
★★★★☆ A poetic expression of hopelessness in a land of limited opportunities, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider follows a Bronco-rider from South Dakota as he traverses a fictionalised version of his ill-fated pursuit of a dream that’s galloping away from him.After […]
★★★★☆ Two years on from The Lobster, pioneering Greek Weird Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the London Film Festival with his 2017 Palme d’Or nominee The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a dark and twisted psychological thriller set in […]
