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Film Review: You Were Never Really Here
★★★★★ “They tell me you’re a brutal man,” a client says to Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, sporting full Mel Gibson beard and a similar shimmering sense of danger and incipient psychosis) and indeed he is. We first meet the lead character of Lynne Ramsay’s new film You Were Never Really Here as he comes out of a…
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#LFF 2017: Loveless review
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t hope to come close to.Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) are a relatively young…
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Film Review: The Ritual
★★★★☆ After the tragic death of their friend, Luke (Rafe Spall), Dom (Sam Troughton), Hutch (Robert James-Collier) and Phil (Arsher Ali) honour him by taking a hiking holiday to Sweden. But after whiny Dom twists his ankle, they take a shortcut back. Bad idea. Following his previous genre efforts Southbound and V/H/S, David Bruckner’s witty…
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Film Review: The Party
★★★★☆ The personal and the political clash in The Party, the first film from Sally Potter since 2012’s Ginger & Rosa. It’s a curt, nasty and deftly acted chamber piece high on laughs and savagery about frustrated idealism and how little it takes to make society fall to pieces.The film opens with a striking shot…
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Film Review: The Meyerowitz Stories
★★★★☆ “Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence,” stated Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums. In Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), family is more an anthology: a series of short stories we tell ourselves in a way that is partial and ‘selected’.It’s a hilarious take on the well-worn trope of the dysfunctional American family,…
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DVD Review: Loving Vincent
★★★★☆ Meticulously crafted over a seven-year period, Loving Vincent is a visually wondrous biographical ode to the great impressionist and an animation like no other, comprised of 65,000 frames individually hand-painted by over one hundred artists. The sheer ambition and scope of this labour of love is an astonishing achievement. The screen shimmers as a…
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Film Review: Double Date
★★★☆☆ There’s blood and banter in equal measure throughout Benjamin Barfoot’s dark, irreverent comedy horror Double Date. The thundering opening credits, accompanied by Swedish psych-rockers Goat, are indication that a unique spin on ‘lad culture’ lies ahead. The well-meaning but wet Jim (played with comic aplomb and a sweet sincerity by the film’s writer (Danny…
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Film Review: Zama
★★★★★ Based on Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama is a beguiling, haunting, comic indictment of the ills of colonialism. Centred on the existential woes of a lowly magistrate, it examines the crushing stasis and ultimate evil of empire. An allegorical reckoning of perpetual struggle, recounted to the eponymous Don Diego de Zama…
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#LFF 2017: The Rider review
★★★★☆ A poetic expression of hopelessness in a land of limited opportunities, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider follows a Bronco-rider from South Dakota as he traverses a fictionalised version of his ill-fated pursuit of a dream that’s galloping away from him.After suffering a near fatal head injury at a rodeo, and learning he might never ride…
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Film Review: A Prayer Before Dawn
★★★★☆ Pulling no punches in telling the true story of Scouse ne’er-do-well Billy Moore’s three years in Bangkok’s infamous Klong Prem Prison, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s A Prayer Before Dawn wins points for its unerring depiction of the brutality of incarceration in Thailand. The film is an unflinching, punishing spectacle which drops us in to the thick…
VENICE 2026
