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Film Review: Ad Astra
★★☆☆☆ It’s the near future: a time of “conflict and hope”, according to the first title cards of James Gray’s latest offering, the space drama Ad Astra. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is an unflappable astronaut with ice in his veins, and whose pulse doesn’t redline even as he falls to Earth from the upper reaches of…
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Film Review: Marriage Story
★★★★★ The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach returns with his latest Netflix collaboration, Marriage Story, which sublimely manages to find humour and humanity in the mutually assured destruction of a messy divorce. Adam Driver plays New York theatre director Charlie, while Scarlett Johansson plays Nicole, an actress who gave up her Hollywood career to be…
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Venice 2019: Jokers, Kings and everyone in-between
As the 76th edition of Venice commenced this week, the oldest film festival in the world has entered some choppy waters. First of all, there was a Hollywood Reporter article that slammed Venice as the “Fuck you” festival, essentially ignoring the #MeToo movement and the calls for gender representation which even Cannes has been slowly…
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The perennial popularity of horror
For years the film industry has been releasing films for audiences that shock and scare. While horror films might be best released during the Halloween season, plenty of these films are now being released all year round. From classic films like Psycho to recent releases like Midsommar, there has been a wide variety of horror films…
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Film Review: The Souvenir
★★★★★ Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical feature The Souvenir introduces Honor Swinton Byrne in a tour de force performance. It’s a stunning evocation of a young woman’s rite of passage in 1980s London, and a poignant exploration of an artist’s early foray into film. When Julie (Swinton Byrne), an earnest film student, falls for raffish, upper-crust Anthony (Tom…
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Film Review: Bait
★★★★★ Contemporary British cinema has continued to surprise and amaze in recent years with the vast array of stunning directorial debuts. From the likes of Lady Macbeth to The Levelling, such first features have introduced adept directors and actors alike to the world. Emerging from the shadows into the limelight, as these films equally did…
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Film Review: Memory: The Origins of Alien
★★★☆☆ Marking its 40-year anniversary, Alexandre O. Phillipe’s new documentary explores the cultural and mythic origins of the film once derided by Pauline Kael as evidence that there was no hope left for movies. Of Alien’s significance in the annals of horror cinema and its enduring appeal to audiences, there can be little doubt. Nevertheless, given…
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Film Review: Hail Satan?
★★★★☆ Act with compassion; protect personal freedom; respect bodily autonomy; maintain beliefs consistent with science: accept human fallibility; privilege wisdom over the written word: these are the seven tenets set out by the Satanic Temple. What is perhaps most surprising about the tenets, apparently coming from the Prince of Darkness, is just how reasonable they seem.…
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Film Review: Pain and Glory
★★★★★ When director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) tells his estranged actor and friend Alberto (Asier Etxeandier), “It’s taken me thirty-two years to reconcile myself” with their final collaboration, what he’s really talking about is Pedro Almodóvar, director of the tender and affecting Pain and Glory, reconciling with the last forty five years as a filmmaker. Salvador’s…
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Locarno 2019: Instinct review
★★★☆☆ Fans of Game of Thrones will be used to seeing Carice van Houten as a sexually powerful witch whose actions frequently cross moral lines, but her new film in which she stars with Marwan Kenzari, last seen in Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, is an altogether different affair. Written by Esther Gerritsen and Reijn, Instinct tells…
VENICE 2026
