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Film Review: Beastie Boys Story
★★★☆☆ New York hip hop antagonists Beastie Boys are a group who have often defied the very notion of pigeon-holing, blending elements of rap, punk and a myriad of samples into their own unique sound. So it feels somewhat fitting that any documentary on the trio should do the same. A live recording of a…
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Film Review: Why Don’t You Just Die!
★★★☆☆ Matvey (Alexksandr Kuznetsov) waits at the front door of his girlfriend’s father’s apartment, priming himself for the bloody task ahead of him. Priming himself, he utters the mantra, “evil won’t touch me”. It may not touch him, but over the next 100 minutes of this hyper-violent comic thriller, it certainly manages to inflict a…
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Film Review: Cuck
★★☆☆☆ Ours is the age of the poisonous neologism. Never have so many words been spawned to express disdain and hatred, like a speckled fungus crawling up a shower curtain: ‘incel’, ‘snowflake’, ‘libtard’, ‘feminazi’, and our very own ‘Brexit’. ‘Cuck’ has two uses: one in politics, where it denigrates liberals, and the other in pornography,…
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Three games inspired by Oscar winners
Once the Oscar season is here, there is always a level of excitement that comes up. You will start seeing the old classics on your TV in preparation for the new ones to win the awards, and the best films are always in the cinemas around that time, making everybody feel the glamorous vibe of…
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Film Review: Who You Think I Am
★★☆☆☆ In his fifth feature, French director Safy Nebbou marshals a game Juliette Binoche through a twisty-turny plot that is equal parts psychological melodrama, romance, and genre thriller. But while Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.…
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Film Review: The Grand Bizarre
★★★★★ After wowing festival audiences at its world premiere at Locarno back in 2018, Jodie Mack’s hypnotic, experimental film-cum-documentary finally finds its way on to release via MUBI. Now that it’s finally here, what are we to make of Mack’s journey into textiled abstraction? The Grand Bizarre is Mack’s first film approaching feature-length, though still…
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BFI Flare 2020: A Dog Barking at the Moon review
★★★★☆ The seismic psychological ripples of China’s one-child policy – so recently and wonderfully explored in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son – are keenly felt in this curiously titled and boldly played family drama. At the heart of this domestic narrative is a fractious, decade-spanning relationship between a mother and daughter. Xiang Zi’s A Dog…
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Film Review: The Whalebone Box
★★★★★ Andrew Kötting is a filmmaker and Professor of Time Based Media. A visual artist who uses film and photography to explore the gaps between dreams and reality, autobiography and self-mythology. It’s hard to put the multi-disciplinary Kötting’s work into a box, and yet he has made an entire film about one. A smooth, sealed-off…
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Game Review: The Complex
★★★☆☆ Fans of text adventures and the sadly defunct Telltale Games series can get their latest fill of branching narratives and choosing their own storyline courtesy of the new interactive sci-fi film, The Complex. “Here is a brand new idea in fiction – a story which ends in any one of a dozen or more…
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Cinema in the Time of Corona: Watching the latest releases at home
With cinemas closed, major releases postponed, and current productions in limbo, this is a dark time for filmmaking. It’s horrible to imagine that after months in shutdown with no revenue, cinemas already struggling may not survive this crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has potentially catastrophic consequences for film culture and for the thousands of people employed…
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