Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ 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 […]
★★★☆☆ Few British actors can lay claim to the kind of performance which we have come to expect and appreciate from Paddy Considine. Journeyman, which Considine writes, directs and stars in as champion boxer Matty Burton, is further proof of […]
★★★★☆ Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won his first Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival with The Shape of Water, a monstrous fairytale about the love between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and a creature from the […]
★★★★★ Billed as the coming-of-age story of an adolescent American teenage girl, Princess Cyd is so much more. Told with tenderness and a perceptive humanist eye by writer-director Stephen Cone, his latest film is an affecting exploration of loss, love […]
★★★☆☆ Inexpressibly beautiful, breathtaking yet terrifying images from snow-capped peaks and vertical cliff faces dominate Jennifer Peedom’s latest documentary Mountain, which explores the magnetic pull exercised by these perilously dangerous summits. A meditation on the potential held, respect demanded and […]
★★★★☆ Moving away from the febrile world of 1970s Italian horror to that decade’s Euro crime dramas, Belgium-based duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have crafted yet another deliriously frenetic, blood-soaked homage to cult cinema of yesteryear.Working from a pulp […]
★★★★☆ The hills are alive with the sound of Satan in Lukas Feigelfeld’s outstanding debut feature. Set in 15th century Austria, high in the Alps, the film details the mental disintegration of a twentysomething milkmaid who lives alone in a […]
★★★★☆ Chronicling the last twelve months of Barack Obama’s tenure, Greg Barker’s The Final Year is an intimate, earnest and insightful expose of the key players of his departing administration and the legacy left in his wake as the world […]
★★★★☆ Opening in 1928, R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End depicted the tragic futility of the Great War through the metaphor of lost youth. British director Saul Dibb’s adaptation, in cinemas this week, is a timely reminder of the true cost of […]
★★★★★ Chile, 1948. The poet, communist and senator Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) has become a thorn in the side of the government and President Gabriel Gonzalez Vidala (Alfredo Castro), a man he helped elect. Clampdowns on subversives, trade unionists and […]
★★☆☆☆ Sofia Exarchou’s debut feature Park tackles the hopelessness of austerity-ravaged Greece through the lives of a ragtag bunch of children and teenagers that call Athens’ abandoned Olympic village their home. Some appear to be homeless, while others only visit […]
★★★★☆ At the time Chasing Asylum was filmed 2,175 men, women and children, seeking refuge in Australia, were being detained indefinitely in centres on Manus Island – in northern Papua New Guinea – and on Nauru, a remote Pacific Ocean […]