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Cannes 2019: Little Joe review
★★★☆☆ Acclaimed Austrian director Jessica Hausner enters the race for this year’s Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival with Little Joe, a modest work of satirical sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw as two genetic engineers who create a “happy” plant.
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Film Review: Atlantics
★★★★☆ Expanding on her own 2009 short film, actor turned director Mati Diop returns to the timely subject of economic migrants from Africa braving the open ocean for a better life with Atlantics. Her feature-length debut is an enigmatic ghost story tackling worker exploitation. Atlantics begins like a common-or-garden social realist drama. Or does it?…
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Film Review: Searching for Ingmar Bergman
★★★☆☆ In the opening scene of The Seventh Seal, Max von Sydow’s knight, washed up on a barren beach, tells Death that his body is ready to die, but he is not. The conflict between the corporeal and the spiritual, the existential and the psychological; the search for identity between the body and the soul…
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Film Review: Amazing Grace
★★★★☆ Based on the 1972 Grammy award-winning album of the same name, Amazing Grace is a moving, long-awaited celebration of the late Aretha Franklin. There are no grand gestures of narrative here, but just a simple, delightful montage of Franklin’s music and the community that gathers to sing and rejoice with her. Using never-before-seen raw…
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Cannes 2019: Sorry We Missed You review
★★★★☆ Following his 2016 Palme d’Or triumph with I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Sorry We Missed You, a furious denunciation of zero-hours Britain. We begin in a familiar place: in the dark. A man with a Mancunian accent is being interviewed for a job.
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Film Review: Birds of Passage
★★★★☆ After exploding onto the international film scene with the Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent, Ciro Guerra returns to cinemas with another story of Colombian tradition. His latest film, Birds of Passage, merges the western gangster genre with a spiritual epic tale on indigenous traditions, set against the drug trade in the 1970s. Accompanying him…
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Cannes 2019: Les Misérables review
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is uncompromising, angry-as-hell political cinema. Set over the course of two days during last year’s World…
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The four types of Netflix Original films
Netflix has emerged over the last few years as one of the big players in cinema. It hasn’t overthrown the box office establishment just yet. Since Netflix don’t release ratings, it’s tough to know just how many people are watching. What is clear, however, is that people are not only watching but engaging, over social…
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Cannes 2019: The Dead Don’t Die review
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an undeadpan comedy which dies halfway through and fails to reanimate itself. Jarmusch’s previous exercises in genre have been triumphant morphings of cinema staples into his own world view. Down by Law…
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DVD Round-up: Apr 2019 edition
April proved a bumper month for home entertainment aficionados, with the usual suspects – Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series and the Criterion Collection – offering a particularly good selection of art house, genre and Hollywood titles for cinéastes. As one might expect in the month of Easter, themes of redemption, faith and mysticism featured heavily…
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