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Sundance 2021: The Pink Cloud review
★★★☆☆ Try as she might to refute any suggestions of prophecy, Iuli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud will strike very close to the bone for audiences everywhere in early 2021. The young filmmaker’s debut is a dreamy, claustrophobic vision of modern life under strict, restrictive circumstances beyond its characters’ control. Sound familiar? Premiering at Sundance in…
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Sundance 2021: Human Factors review
★★★☆☆ When is a house not a home? And how thinly stretched are the ties that bind together the people within their walls? Ronny Trocker’s Human Factors, a patient, brooding drama, peers through cracks in the brickwork of a family unit whose growing divisions may be beyond repair. “It was a good idea to come…
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Sundance 2021: Programme preview
If the past year has taught cultural institutions the world over anything, it’s that the show can and must go on. The continuing Covid-19 pandemic means that the 2021 Sundance Film Festival will be – predominantly – a digital experience. Save for a select few satellite screenings set up across the US within strict health…
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Film Review: Synchronic
★★★☆☆ Blending science fiction, crime drama and psychedelia, Synchronic is the wildly eccentric fourth film by American filmmaking duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (The Endless, Spring). New Orleans paramedic team and best friends Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) find themselves working a series of strange jobs which involve some bizarre and extreme…
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Film Review: The Capote Tapes
★★★☆☆ Cinema has a love/hate relationship with Truman Capote. On the evidence of The Capote Tapes, almost everyone did. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – a slim novella a cigarette holder away from plagiarising Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin – was made into an iconic film with a luminous Audrey Hepburn. The filmmakers schmaltzed Tiffany’s up, to…
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Film Review: Beginning
★★★★☆ Beginning is, in many respects, an astonishing film in its assured austerity, confidence and evident lack of compromise. More astonishing, perhaps, that it is Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature. There are hints of Kiarostami, Bergman and even Tarkovsky in its moments of psychological surrealism, yet rarely if ever does Beginning feel derivative of…
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Film Review: Assassins
★★★★☆ American filmmaker Ryan White, director of the acclaimed Netflix mini-series The Keepers, spins a web of riveting, murderous intrigue in his latest documentary Assassins. At its centre lies the killing of Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 13th February 2017. Half-brother to the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, son to…
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Why Casablanca is one of the greatest movies ever
Although 1942’s Casablanca was an A-list picture with major stars like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, no one involved with its production thought it would be anything more special than the hundreds of other movies Hollywood was producing that year. Casablanca went on to win three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best…
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Film Review: Quo Vadis, Aida?
★★★★★ In July 1995, during the final months of the Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb soldiers massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men in what became known as the Srebrenica Genocide. The massacre happened on the watch of the international community and the UN, who supposedly were protecting the Bosniak civilians. In Quo Vadis, Aida?’s devastating…
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Film Review: 76 Days
★★★★☆ The coronavirus and its consequences have already become the subject of cinema. Aside from last year’s lockdown movies like Host and Songbird, Alex Gibney released his j’accuse against the Trump administration’s response in the form of Totally Under Control. In contrast, 76 Days focuses on the beginning of the outbreak in the Chinese city…
VENICE 2026
