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Film Review: Boy Erased
★★★★☆ Over the last few years, Joel Edgerton has been quietly making a name for himself as a solid director, picking interesting, disturbing material such as The Gift. Now, his latest effort Boy Erased exposes the evils of gay conversion camps in the United States. It is truly astonishing that in 2018, it is still legal in…
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Film Review: If Beale Street Could Talk
★★★★★ Following 2016’s Moonlight, the unparalleled Barry Jenkins returns with If Beale Street Could Talk, a near-perfect adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel. That this is only Jenkins’ third feature makes the whole endeavour even more astonishing, and proof, if any were needed, of his consummate abilities as a master filmmaker. Delivered non-sequentially, Beale Street tells…
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Toronto 2018: Saf review
★★★★☆ Turkish director Ali Vatansever returns with his second feature, Saf, a social drama that examines the human cost of urban renewal. Out-of-work Kamir (Erol Afsin) seems perpetually on the brink of destitution. His faultless insistence on doing the right thing means that he won’t take a job with the construction company who are exploiting…
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Film Review: A Faithful Man
★★★★☆ In his Truffaut-esque shaggy-dog love story A Faithful Man, actor turned director Louis Garrel takes an irreverent look at fidelity, power dynamics and fantasy in relationships. When Abel (Garrel) comes home to his lover, Marianne (Laetitia Casta) she confesses to him that she is pregnant. But before he can react she has a further…
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DVD Review: Witness for the Prosecution
★★★★☆ While not amongst the greater, more celebrated titles in Billy Wilder’s acclaimed filmography, his big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution boasts a fine, scenery-chewing performance by Charles Laughton, here playing a cantankerous barrister defending a murder suspect. Leonard Vole (a miscast Tyrone Power, in his last screen appearance before dropping…
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Film Review: Beautiful Boy
★★★☆☆ Belgian director Felix van Groeningen brings his talents to bear on the true story of Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet), a talented and charismatic young writer eaten up and spat out by drug addiction. The result is a nicely shot, often very moving, but ultimately safe drama with two Academy-baiting performances. Van Groeningen shoots his…
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Film Review: Fahrenheit 11/9
★★★☆☆ In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, Michael Moore looks back at the multi-faceted reasons behind the unthinkable result. Juxtaposed against the jubilance of Hillary’s election party is Castle Trump, set to the theme of The Omen, no less. Moore opens Fahrenheit 11/9 by asking, “How the fuck did this happen?”. How…
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Film Review: Out of Blue
★★★☆☆ Based on the Martin Amis novel Night Train, Carol Morley’s Out of Blue is a metaphysical neo-noir with a world-weary performance from Patricia Clarkson. Detective Mike Hoolihan (Clarkson) is investigating the mysterious death of an astrophysicist, Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer). As the investigation and Jennifer’s research begin to fray at Hoolihan’s nerves, she disappears…
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Toronto 2018: Freaks review
★★★☆☆ In a cinematic landscape saturated with superhero mega-blockbusters from Marvel, Fox and Warner Bros., writer-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein take their cue from the X-Men series’ themes of oppression to deliver Freaks – a small-scale, intriguing superhero indie with a killer hook. One of the great, and largely overlooked failures of modern superhero movies is their…
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Toronto 2018: Cities of Last Things review
★★★☆☆ In the near future, Lao Zhang (Jack Kao) stalks and murders three people, including an elderly, hospitalised man and his ex-wife, before killing himself. The question at the heart of Ho Di Wing’s Cities of Last Things is what could have driven him to commit these crimes. Told in three chronologically reversed stages, we…
VENICE 2026
