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Film Review: Deadpool 2
★★★★☆ 2016’s Deadpool bucked the trend of sanitised superhero schlock with winking humour, copious gore, and f-bombs galore. So how does one follow-up one of the most refreshing blockbusters in recent memory? The answer, evidently, is more profanity, more Troma-esque ultra-violence, more snarky adolescent meta-commentary. In short: more Deadpool. Filling in for departing director Tim…
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Cannes 2018: Shoplifters review
★★★★★ Cannes favourite Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the Croisette for the seventh time with Shoplifters, a quietly devastating portrayal of family and theft in contemporary Japan, and one of his best works of recent years. The survival of families has been a constant concern for Kore-eda. Whether it’s the abandoned children of Nobody Knows, the…
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Cannes 2018: Mandy review
★★★☆☆ Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos enters Cannes Critics’ Week with his second film, the psychotropic arthouse horror Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough as a couple terrorised by cultists. Over the years, Nicolas Cage has acquired a reputation as a mad dog actor. Whether gurning through Bad Lieutenant or the simply bad The Wicker…
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Cannes 2018: BlacKkKlansman review
★★★★☆ Spike Lee goes for the jugular of the alt-right movement and President Trump in this hilarious and vital Palme d’Or contender. A comic thriller about a black police officer going undercover to infiltrate the KKK, it’s amazingly based on a true story – despite what looks to be a satirical scenario. Lee directs BlacKkKlansman…
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Film Review: The House That Jack Built
★★☆☆☆ Persona non grata and middle-aged man terrible Lars von Trier returns to UK cinema screens with serial killer black comedy The House That Jack Built, as slick as viscera and as vile as the subject it portrays. There’s a scene near the start of The House That Jack Built which pretty much sums up…
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Cannes 2018: 3 Faces review
★★★☆☆ Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is the theme of Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, a Chekhovian portrait of lives going to waste in an Iranian society of gender inequality and rural tradition. A young woman speaks directly to her phone, delivering a message, a plea to be heard by a famous…
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Cannes 2018: Climax review
★★★★☆ Gaspar Noé is back on form with Climax, a frenzied tale of a dance group training for an American tour. Their after-work party descends into a bacchanalian rave with episodes of drug-fuelled transgression, thanks to a bowl of sangria spiked with LSD. Set in 1996 and based on a true story, Noé has made something…
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Film Review: Girl
★★★★★ Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont makes his directorial debut with Girl, a sympathetic and emotionally rich portrait of a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who has aspirations of one day becoming a ballet dancer. Taking on the role of Lara is cisgender actor Victor Polster. A trained dancer, Polster offers a…
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Film Review: The Image Book
★★☆☆☆ The cinema legend that is Jean-Luc Godard returns to UK screens for one night only (2 December) with The Image Book, a visual palimpsest of ideas and a muttering meditation on the world as the octogenarian finds it today. As the old saying goes, there’s a lot that’s new and interesting in Godard’s The…
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Cannes 2018: Girls of the Sun review
★★★★☆ French journalist Matilde H. (Emmanuelle Bercot) joins a battalion of female Kurdish fighters taking back their hometown against misogynist psychopaths ISIS, in Eva Husson’s impressive and righteously angry war film, Girls of the Sun. Based on a true events which occurred in 2015, with names changed to protect the identities of those involved, Girls…
VENICE 2026
