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Film Review: Blade Runner 2049
★★★★★ One of the most eagerly-awaited films of 2017, we run the critical Voight-Kampff test to find out if Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a shoddy replicant of Ridley Scott’s acclaimed 1982 original, or a new generation of science fiction. In an early draft of Hampton Francher’s Blade Runner script, there was…
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DVD Review: Belle de Jour
★★★★★ Among Spanish-born Mexican director Luis Buñuel’s most successful works, Belle de Jour’s re-release comes just in time for the film’s fiftieth anniversary. A satire on repressed bourgeois sexuality, the 1967 film is both darkly erotic and rich in social commentary.Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), is rich, beautiful and bored. A devoted wife to Pierre (Jean Sorel),…
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NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying review
★★☆☆☆ Richard Linklater aficionados will be familiar with the director’s unique ability to conjure up cinematic poetry from a set of trademarked ingredients: actors engaging in endless, often day-long conversations, and a camera following their footsteps.Last Flag Flying contains all the elements that made Linklater a cult figure in the US indie universe, but the…
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Film Review: Daphne
★★★★☆ A young chef tries to booze and bang the pain away in director Peter Mackie Burns’ engaging, charming comic drama Daphne. Set in London, in a largely nocturnal landscape of fleeting pleasures and unacknowledged hurts, it makes for a timely study of young angst. Millennials are a sordid bunch, it seems. What with the…
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Film Review: The Road to Mandalay
★★★★☆ Midi Z’s The Road to Mandalay lacks any of the exotic longing or Orientalism implied by the Kipling poem it derives its name from. Instead, the Myanmar-born director has created a Shakespearean tragedy charting the dehumanising process of two migrants. The films of Midi Z have always been torn between an urgent desire to…
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Film Review: Brimstone
★★★☆☆ Set in the unforgiving American West at the end of the 19th century, Brimstone – the first English language film written and directed by Dutchman Martin Koolhoven – is a tale of one woman’s quest for survival and retribution.Liz, superbly portrayed by Dakota Fanning, is a young woman whose life is spent on the…
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Criterion Review: Certain Women
★★★★★ Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women tells three stories of female malcontent in Montana, one of the least populous states in the United States. Connected by only the thinnest of narrative threads, each story offers delicate, quietly moving insight into the lives of its subjects.Lawyer Laura Wells (Laura Dern) has a client who has been stiffed…
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Film Review: The Bad Batch
★★☆☆☆ Following on from her stylish and well-received debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, American-Iranian Ana Lily Amirpour returns with The Bad Batch (Netflix, 22 Sep), a post-apocalyptic cannibal movie that devours its influences without ever getting to the red meat.Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, a girl with a cherry tattoo and a Tank…
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Film Review: Strong Island
★★★★☆ The anguished gaze and furious composure of bereaved sibling Yance Ford makes his film, Strong Island, a deeply personal essay on grief. Two decades after the fatal shooting of his brother, the restraint he employs in telling his family’s quest for justice leaves its mark.“Are you uncomfortable?” Ford asks, framed in close up, addressing…
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Film Review: On Body and Soul
★★★★☆ An older man and a younger woman accidentally discover that, every night, they encounter each other in their dreams as a pair of deer. The premise of Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul sounds like the perfect recipe for rom-com cheesiness, yet it’s anything but.At first astounded, the couple draw closer together as their…
VENICE 2026