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Film Review: Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
★★★★☆ Starting in the 1970s, political activist Marion Stokes embarked on the largest, most important project of her life: to record every moment of news footage possible. At the time of her death in 2012, she had amassed over 70,000 hours of unedited footage across nine TV news channels. Hers a Baudrillardian effort to discover…
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Film Review: Love Child
★★★★☆ Danish director Eva Mulvad and co-director Lea Glob turn their attention to an Iranian family caught up in international bureaucracy as they flee from persecution and the threat of execution in Love Child. Never has the banality of the plight of refugees been laid out so plainly as in this heartbreaking, Kafkaesque documentary. In…
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Film Review: About Endlessness
★★★★☆ Only Roy Andersson would call a 78-minute film About Endlessness. It is of a piece with his droll Swedish wit, a universe drawn with fastidious precision and painted in a palette of greys, drab greens, beiges and browns. Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a…
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Blu-ray Review: Hoop Dreams
★★★★★ Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert’s seminal 1994 Hoop Dreams – making its UK Blu-ray debut this week – charts the aspirations and tribulations, the jump shots and the rebounds of two black American teenagers shooting for their own version of the American dream. William Gates and Arthur Agee Jr. are two high…
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Film Review: Shirley
★★★☆☆ From a script by Sarah Gubbin – who adapted a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell – whose story was based on the prolific horror author Shirley Jackson – Josephine Decker’s fourth feature is (to say the least) a multi-layered affair. Demanding patience and perseverance, we dig down through agoraphobia, heavy drinking and airs of…
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Film Review: Relic
★★★★☆ The slow rot of psychological decay is brought into the physical realm with creeping, insidious stealth by Natalia Erika James in her highly assured, thought-provoking feature debut, Relic. Re-framing more traditional genre choices for representing dementia, the Japanese-Australian filmmaker has crafted a chilling, mysterious horror to communicate the confusion and terror caused by diminishing intellectual…
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Film Review: The Painter and the Thief
★★★★☆ Again proving that great strength can be drawn from laying bare perceived weakness, Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief is an art heist film like no other and an arresting documentary of startling, often brutal, emotional honesty. His 2016 debut, Magnus, which charted the rise to stardom of a chess prodigy in intimate, familial detail, explored…
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Film Review: Mogul Mowgli
★★★☆☆ Riz Ahmed battles questions of cultural and religious identity, familial expectation, self and health in order to find his calling, and to find his way home, in Mogul Mowgli. Knowing where you’re going cannot be known without knowing where you’ve come from, and director Bassam Tariq’s layered narrative feature debut shifts through time and space as…
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Film Review: African Apocalypse
★★★★☆ “You’d never know what’s underneath, unless someone told you.” History books, lectures and internet searches cannot possibly substitute hearing first-hand the effects of Europe’s colonialist past on one of the most impoverished countries in the world. In Rob Lemkin’s African Apocalypse, Oxford University student Femi Nylander’s voyage of discovery digs into a trail of…
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The worst film characters to meet in a casino
Casinos are great settings for movies. They hold the promise of high-stakes action, life-changing decisions, moral dilemmas, and an ever-present element of risk and danger, all in a glamorous setting with plenty of complex, flawed, and fascinating characters. It’s no wonder that Hollywood has loved to portray gamblers, cardsharps, and hustlers over the years, and…
VENICE 2026