Film Review: Ema
★★★★★ When Pablo Larraín took the helm of Jackie, it was the first time the Chilean director had attempted two things: a story set outside of Latin America and one with a female protagonist. With Ema, Larraín is back in […]
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 […]
Film Review: System Crasher
★★★★☆ System Crasher is the outstanding feature film debut of German director Nora Fingscheidt. A tremendous slice of life filled with light and energy, which doesn’t shy away from the tough realities of what social care is like for children with […]
Film Review: Radioactive
★★☆☆☆ On paper the story of Marie Curie, a pioneering woman of science, seems like prime awards bait: with a big central role for Rosamund Pike, playing an eccentric proto-feminist. Sadly, Radioactive is as lifeless and inert as a rock, […]
Film Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
★★★★☆ The lives of painters tend to be told with broad strokes. Famous artists are portrayed as tortured and romantic or else their work hangs over the story, weighing it down with a set of cultural expectations which are hard […]
Film Review: Greed
★★★☆☆ Michael Winterbottom brings together a who’s who of British comic talent for his fast fashion satire Greed. Conceived as a biting commentary on inequality, sweatshop labour and…well, greed, the film lacks fluency and laughs, rarely managing to lands its […]
Film Review: Parasite
★★★★★ Arriving in UK cinemas cloaked in the Oscars buzz of a Best Picture and Best Director nomination, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is riding high in the expectations of cinema-goers. Conditions are almost ripe for a backlash, the sort of overhype […]
Interview: Song Kang-ho, Parasite
Having already topped many end-of-year lists in territories blessed with an earlier release schedule – not long after becoming the first-ever Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes – the hype for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is very real and richly deserved.
Film Review: The Lighthouse
★★★★☆ Back in 2015, Robert Eggers delighted critics with the flesh-pecking horror of The Witch, a directorial feature debut which blended the theatrics of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with shades of M. Night Shyamalan and the more grizzly adaptations of […]
Film Review: Sorry We Missed You
★★★★☆ Now into his sixth decade as a director, Ken Loach has followed up the Palme D’Or-winning I, Daniel Blake with another hard-hitting work of social realism. Teaming up once more with regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, Sorry We Missed You […]
Film Review: Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
★★★★☆ Prolific documentary maker Nick Broomfield returns with another musical project, this time choosing a more personal topic: the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Broomfield’s close friend Marianne Ihlen. “I was born,” Leonard Cohen once remarked, “with the gift of […]
Interview: Alison Klayman, dir. The Brink
Alison Klayman made her name as a film-maker with 2012’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a close study of the revered Chinese artist which followed him across the course of several years, leading up to his eventual arrest in Beijing in 2011.