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Film Review: Carmilla
★★☆☆☆ Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is among the most influential horror stories ever written. Director Emily Harris’ de-fanged adaptation follows plenty of other versions of the novella, zeroing in on the ‘lesbian vampire’ aspect, but the result is deathly dull. Teenager Lara (Hannah Rae) is isolated and lonely. Living with father (Greg Wise) and mean…
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Film Review: Being a Human Person
★★★★☆ Charting the production of Roy Andersson’s latest and possibly final film, About Endlessness, documentarian Fred Scott explores in his first feature the career of one of Sweden’s most beloved and singular filmmakers. The result is an affectionate and often enchanting tribute that is as in thrall to the affable Andersson as it is compelled…
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#LFF 2020: Gold for Dogs review
★★☆☆☆ “Your cock and your words fill me with joy.” Crass to the point of being offensive, these lyrics – from one song of the soundtrack to Gold for Dogs – effectively sum up this deplorable coming-of-age debut feature. Nonsensical and tonally misguided, we travel from France’s Atlantic coast to Paris and back, but go…
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#LFF 2020: Shadow Country review
★★★★☆ Set in a small village on the Czech-Austrian border, and spanning fifteen years pre, during and post-Second World War, Bohdan Sláma’s Shadow Country is a monumental piece of filmmaking. Simultaneously an historical allegory of tremendous scope and a claustrophobic, cautionary tale of collaboration and bloody revenge, it is both epic in scale and intimate…
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#LFF 2020: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets review
★★★★☆ Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Shot over the course of a single night, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets depicts the final night of ‘The Roaring 20s’, a Las Vegas bar…
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#LFF 2020: Time review
★★★★☆ Positing the question of whether the principal objective of incarceration is punishment, rehabilitation or undue persecution, Garrett Bradley’s Time is another vital addition to a growing canon of films to pointedly critique the US legal and prison systems’ unjust treatment of people of colour. If Ava DuVernay’s ground-breaking 2016 film, 13th, provided the macro,…
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Film Review: Kajillionaire
★★★★☆ No one’s parents are perfect. But in Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) really push the limit of what any child should have to put up with. Or rather, do without. Stepping back behind the camera for her first feature since 2011’s The Future, the multi-talented writer-director plays the long con in an…
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Film Review: Saint Maud
★★★★☆ Director Rose Glass makes her feature debut with this visceral psychological horror. While the festival chatter has lately been dominated by Gotham’s most notorious villain, Saint Maud is the dive into obsession, isolation and urban deprivation that you need right now. Maud (Morfydd Clark) is convinced that she was put on this earth for a higher…
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Film Review: On the Rocks
★★★★☆ Returning to the director’s chair for the first time since 2017’s The Beguiled, and following the pop-baroque of efforts like Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks is back-to-basics filmmaking. It may well also be her most mature picture to date. Growing slowly distant with husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) as he takes lengthy business…
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#LFF 2020: Programme preview
Neither shaken nor stirred by the current climate, and rolling with this year’s seemingly unending string of punches with remarkable aplomb, the 2020 edition of the BFI London Film Festival will be unlike any that have preceded it. The big news is that this year’s terrific selection of the world’s best new films will be made available…
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