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Home Alone’s five best booby traps
Home Alone is nothing if not one of the most classic Christmas movies out there. With the movie celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, chances are that you’re going to take some time out of your Christmas celebrations to sit down and watch it with your family. Whether this is a yearly tradition or you…
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Film Review: Farewell Amor
★★★☆☆ Bookmarked by static long takes of three people, firstly in the immensity of JFK’s arrivals hall and then a cramped, one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, there is a wonderful balance to the construction of Farewell Amor. Between these intimate moments, Ekwa Msangi takes us full circle with the story of the difficulties faced by an Angolan family reunited in…
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Film Review: The Mole Agent
★★★☆☆ The fear of old age’s erosion of our faculties, our agency and our relevance is a potent, almost paralysing one: the way we perceive and treat our elders invariably reveals something about ourselves. In her charming and off-kilter documentary The Mole Agent, Chilean director Maite Alberdi confronts that fear literally through the eyes of…
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Film Review: Il Mio Corpo
★★★★☆ “Memories fill the heart, but they shouldn’t hold back the future. You always have to stay positive.” Though this sage, admirably optimistic counsel is well-meaning, it defies the harsh reality of Sicilian life presented in Michele Pennetta’s contemplative quasi-documentary Il Mio Corpo. That this advice is given by a priest to a young man embarking…
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Film Review: Crock of Gold
★★★★☆ Visually striking and audibly arresting from its opening number until the curtain comes down, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is an affectionate paean to its irascible, impudent frontman. Just as The Pogues’ creative force and lead singer could “hear the colours and see the sounds” of his beloved Tipperary fields,…
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Film Review: Mank
★★★★☆ “You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one.” So claims screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz on the circular narrative of his magnum opus. In a little over the two-hour mark, David Fincher’s luscious, elliptical and elusive Mank – from a script by his…
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Film Review: Host
★★★★☆ Following its debut on Shudder earlier this year, Rob Savage’s sensational tech-horror hit gets a much-deserved wide release. Conceived, written, shot and released all in the early months of the Covid crisis and taking place entirely on a Zoom call, Host is about as contemporary – and chilling – as it gets. In the…
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Small Axe: Alex Wheatle review
★★★★★ The latest offering from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, Alex Wheatle (co-written with Alastair Siddons) features an impressive debut from Sheyi Cole in the titular role. The film follows the early life of the award-winning writer from his time in care, his love of DJ-ing to a short stint in prison where he was…
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Film Review: Falling
★★★☆☆ The multi-hyphenate Viggo Mortensen can now add director to his list of creative endeavors with Falling, an austere familial drama which he also wrote, scored, co-produced and stars in. Mortensen plays John Peterson, a pilot whose stable life in California with husband Eric (Terry Chen) and young daughter threatens to be upended when his…
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Film Review: County Lines
★★★★☆ Based on the ‘county lines’ crisis whereby gangs use children to smuggle drugs from large cities to smaller towns, writer-director Henry Blake’s feature debut is a harsh, bleak and moving slice of social realism. Based on Blake’s short of the same name, County Lines follows the travails of 14-year-old Tyler (a phenomenal Conrad Khan),…
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