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The five best casinos of the James Bond franchise
When we think of James Bond, our minds begin to fill with images of fast cars, beautiful women, glamourous locations, and danger. But this isn’t all the legendary spy is famous for and many of us will think ‘casino’ when we hear the name James Bond. It’s possible that Bond learned his card playing skills…
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Film Review: Wolfwalkers
★★★★☆ Adding yet another jewel to their burgeoning crown, Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon’s latest film, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers, is a triumphant blend of mythology and history, of soaring imagination and cruel reality. It is the enchanting adventure story of an unlikely friendship between two girls. They are not so much from…
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Film Review: Totally Under Control
★★★★☆ Documentary-making machine Alex Gibney (here joined by co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger) returns with a timely – perhaps too timely – postmortem on the American response to the Coronavirus pandemic, Totally Under Control. Right from the start, Gibney draws attention to the difficulty of making a documentary during a global pandemic. Cameras are…
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Film Review: Summer of ’85
★★★★☆ François Ozon returns to screens with Summer of ’85, based on Aidan Chambers’ novel Dance on My Grave. A sumptuously shot, nostalgic bildungsroman framed by a bitttersweet darkness, the film deploys many well-worn tropes of the coming of age drama. But they’re executed with such a light, self-aware confidence that Summer of ’85 has…
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Film Review: One Man and His Shoes
★★★★☆ “How much do you get paid, just to wear these shoes?” David Letterman’s question to Michael Jordan is met with shrieks of delight from his studio audience. The soon-to-be global superstar bashfully responds, “A lot,” grinning from ear to ear. It’s 1986, Ronald Reagan is President and capitalism is alive and well in the United…
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Film Review: The Climb
★★★★☆ A revelation on a bike ride in France leads to a rift between two childhood friends, but through thick and thin, uphill and downhill, friendship proves surprisingly and hearteningly durable in Michael Angelo Covino’s The Climb. Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Covino) are BFFs on holiday in France in the run-up to Kyle’s…
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Film Review: Cinema Paradiso
★★★★☆ A major contributor to the reverential narrative of wistful cinema, Giuseppe Tornatore’s magnum opus Cinema Paradiso is an elegant distillation of the form’s escapist qualities and the garland of an industry that understands global audiences’ enduring appetite for wild nostalgia. Returning to his lavish Rome apartment, revered film director Salvatore Di Vita (Jacques Perrin)…
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How cinema speaks to the other arts
It’s often been said that birds of a feather, flock together. That might not always be true when it comes to business but the entertainment industry worldwide is an exception to the status quo. Cinema, mostly made in Hollywood with amazing exotic settings, is the one special art form that has the ability to reach…
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Film Review: I Am Greta
★★☆☆☆ In 2018, a quiet 15 year-old girl from Sweden began protesting the climate crisis by striking from school. Amidst global disquiet and political inertia, Greta Thunberg rapidly became the face of contemporary climate activism. In his directorial debut, Nathan Grossman charts her rise in this perfectly enjoyable but ultimately unpersuasive and shallow documentary. I…
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Film Review: The Other Lamb
★★★★☆ This year’s surfeit of films about cults hits its stride with Malgorzata Szumowska’s first English-language picture. A visceral, Atwoodian journey, The Other Lamb is as much an examination of narcissism and the existing structures of gendered power as it is of the limits of faith. Living a philistine existence and clad in pseudo-puritanical garb, the…
VENICE 2026
