-
Toronto 2018: Maya review
★★★☆☆ When French war reporter Gabriel (Roman Kolinka) is released from being held hostage by ISIS, he insists that he’s fine, refusing help from his hospital-appointed counsellor. But when his relationship with his girlfriend breaks down, it’s clear that Gabriel needs time to reflect on his ordeal. Gabriel heads to Goa, where he spent some…
-
Toronto 2018: Kursk review
★★★☆☆ In August 2000, the Russian submarine Kursk suffered two devastating explosions during a test firing of torpedoes. Many of the crew were killed in the explosions, but as the wrecked sub sank to the seabed, twenty-three of the crew were trapped alive in one of the vessel’s remaining compartments. Thomas Vinterberg’s retelling of the…
-
Film Review: High Life
★★★★★ If there’s a single design choice that could give us the key to Claire Denis’ challenging, esoteric science fiction High Life it’s the spacesuits. Invariably, the suits found on the starships Enterprise and Nostromo are sterile things made of sleek, impermeable material, shielding their wearers from the void. The suits in High Life, however, serve…
-
Film Review: A Million Little Pieces
★★☆☆☆ Following her dalliance with the Fifty Shades franchise, Sam Taylor-Johnson turns her hand to addiction drama in A Million Little Pieces, starring husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The results, despite some very nice directorial flourishes, are rather disappointing in this rote and reductive portrayal of substance abuse. The film begins well enough, with Taylor-Johnson’s James throwing himself…
-
DVD Review: The Nun
★★★★☆ This month marks the re-release of Jacques Rivette’s 1966 film The Nun on DVD and Blu-ray. Marking a slow shift away from simply releasing canonical filmmakers of the French New Wave – not to discredit Truffaut or Godard – Rivette’s second feature is a gem of the pivotal cinematic movement. Playfully opening with an…
-
Film Review: The Predator
★★☆☆☆ Shane Black returns to the series he co-wrote in 1987, now in the director’s chair, for this fourth instalment in the Predator franchise. Long-term fans will be pleased that The Predator is a soft reboot – Predator 2 and even 2010’s Predators are still canon – but the magic formula of the original remains elusive.…
-
DVD Review: Free Solo
★★★☆☆ Among the most extreme of thrill-seekers, Alex Honnold is a climber who favours the “free solo” method, ascending cliffs without the aid of ropes. Meru directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin record Honnold’s unprecedented attempt to scale the 3,000 foot-high El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in their hair-rising documentary. Honnold is a very…
-
Film Review: JT LeRoy
★★★☆☆ Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl, director Justin Kelly’s latest offering tells the astonishing (partially) true story of Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, a literary persona invented by writer Laura Albert (Laura Dern). To pull off the ruse, Albert convinced Knoop (Kristen Stewart) to play ‘JT’ in public. Albert later claims that JT LeRoy…
-
Film Review: Lucky
★★★★★ Lucky follows the journey of a 90-year-old atheist who finds himself at the precipice of life. It begins like a beautifully slow comedy, filled with the quirks of Lucky’s daily routine and his almost mystical interactions with the town’s unique characters, but then it expands into a heart wrenching meditation on death; an unhurried…
-
Film Review: The Rider
★★★★☆ Existing in a similar milieu to her feature debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is a delicate portrayal of an up-and-coming rodeo rider coming to terms with life-changing injuries caused by participating in his beloved competition. In her second feature, Zhao expresses the essence of independent cinema in Italian neorealism by…
VENICE 2026
