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Film Review: Bad Reputation
★★★★☆ LA, 1975. Feminism is taking off, and the women’s liberation movement in America is well underway. Joan Jett emerges, “like a naive kid” amongst the spark collisions of Bowie, Susie Quattro, quaaludes, Stonewall, the destruction of the nuclear family, the bomb, and the corruption of America by Rock n Roll culture following the hippie…
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Film Review: An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
★☆☆☆☆ The Greasy Strangler director Jim Hosking’s second feature, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, tries to make a virtue out of extreme silliness and disjointed, oh-so-random plot points, but the end result is a desperately tiresome viewing experience. Do you like to, y’know, get silly? Like, putting on fright wigs and suddenly shouting non-sequiturs silly?…
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Film Review: Halloween
★★★☆☆ Michael Myers returns to slash through celluloid in David Gordon Green’s take on ‘The Shape’ and his karmic counterpoint, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), in Halloween. Aiming to restore Myers to his mythic and simplistic roots, Green fashions a slasher that both idolizes and plays with John Carpenter’s original iconography, to exceedingly varied but…
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Playing the odds: the psychology of the risk-taker
Movie-lovers have always been fascinated by films on casinos and all manner of gambling – so much so that they offer a solid staple for Hollywood and major film producers around the world looking for box office hits and huge earnings. From Ocean’s 11 to Casino Royale, Maverick to The Gambler, 21 to A Fistful…
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#LFF 2018: Stan & Ollie review
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours by A.J. Marriot, who also featured as a consultant on the film, Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is part biography and part homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, arguably the greatest stage and screen comedy performers of their time. Opening mid-shoot on a…
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#LFF 2018: Can You Ever Forgive Me? review
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over 400 faked letters. Melissa McCarthy has quietly been on a real bum streak of late…
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Interview: Zheng Kai, star of Shadow
Zheng Kai is one of China’s biggest actors, but in the West he’s hardly known. Promoting his latest film, Shadow, a visually striking period action epic from Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero, The House of Flying Daggers and The Great Wall, Zheng is hoping that all that is about to change.
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#LFF 2018: Sew the Winter to My Skin review
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew the Winter to My Skin, writer-director Jahmil X. T. Qubeka uses western tropes to mythologise…
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Film Review: Lords of Chaos
★★★★☆ Lords of Chaos charts the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the increasingly bitter rivalry between two major players on the scene, which in 1993 led to the murder of musician Øystein Aarseth. Informing the audience the film we’re about to see is based on ‘truth and lies’, Jonas Åkerlund’s excellent second feature takes…
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#LFF 2018: Assassination Nation review
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip bat-shit crazy, Sam Levinson’s film is a declaration of war against the social and political…
VENICE 2026