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Toronto 2018: Our picks of the festival
As the Toronto International Film Festival gears up for its 2018 edition (6-16 September), awards contenders, experimental filmmakers and indie hopefuls come together for a 10-day extravaganza of some of the world’s best cinema. This year’s festival opens with Netflix’s Outlaw King, the latest from director David Mackenzie and starring Chris Pine. Both Mackenzie and Pine…
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Film Review: Sunset
★★★☆☆ Hungarian director László Nemes’ long-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-winning Son of Saul, Sunset thrusts us into a Mitteleuropean heart of darkness and a fever dream which ultimately lacks substance. “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now,” sang Morrissey. And the same could be…
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Venice 2018: Vox Lux review
★★★★★ We’ve already had A Star Is Born here at Venice. Now, with Brady Corbet’s latest film Vox Lux, we have A Star Is Torn – a truly unique power-pop epic starring Natalie Portman as the mononymous singer Celeste, whose rise to fame is intertwined with other tragic trajectories. Corbet originally caught our attention with the…
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Venice 2018: Dragged Across Concrete review
★★☆☆☆ S. Craig Zahler falls between ever-widening stools with his brutal new crime drama Dragged Across Concrete, which might have been more representative of the viewing experience had it been called Dragged Slowly Across Concrete. Recently-released criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) returns home to find his mother hooking to pay for drugs. Meanwhile two cops, Brett…
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Film Review: What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
★★★★★ For years, Roberto Minervini has been chronicling the lives of the poor, marginalised and the voiceless. From the neglected child in his fiction work Low Tide to the plight of the Louisiana homeless in The Other Side, Minervini looks hard and yet sympathetically at those caught on the shitty side of the American Dream.…
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Criterion Review: Smithereens
★★★★☆ The grimy, crime-ridden cesspool of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s is a well-worn cinematic setting, but in her debut 1982 feature Smithereens, indie director Susan Seidelman used guerilla filmmaking techniques and a faux-documentary style to unearth the vitality and the verve of urban life at the bottom. Smithereens opens with the punkish…
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DVD Review: Death Line
★★★★☆ Released as Raw Meat in the US, Gary Sherman’s cult debut feature Death Line works as both a gruesome exploitation horror set in the London Underground, and a surprisingly effective satire of the British class system. You’ll never hear the phrase “Mind the doors” in the same way again. When student Patricia (Sharon Gurney) find…
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DVD Review: Assault
★★★☆☆ Also known as In the Devil’s Garden, British director Sidney Hayers’ 1971 film Assault is cast very much in the mode of contemporary Italian giallo – lurid crime, exploitative sexuality and plenty of voyeuristic pleasure. It may not be up to the standard of the best crime cinema, but Assault is sufficiently well executed to…
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FrightFest 2018: What Keeps You Alive review
★★★★☆ What Keeps You Alive is not just a edge-of-your-seat style thriller, but a searing portrait into relationships, and the horror of intimacy, or of not even really knowing who it is you’re sleeping next to. Cozy idyll gives way with a (literal) thud to a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game, (and the most tense or only…
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FrightFest 2018: Summer of 84 review
★★★☆☆ A joint directorial effort between François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, Summer of 84 is a somewhat disappointing entry into the hallowed halls of nostalgia, following in the footsteps of Andy Muschietti’s IT update and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Formulaic, it has all of the familiar tropes in place: bike rides to an eighties…
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