Film Reviews
Alone at Night review - cam girl meets crowbar killerMonday, 07 August 2023![]()
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time. Read more... |
Joy Ride review - pioneering horninessSunday, 06 August 2023![]()
This Seth Rogen-produced, Family Guy writers-co-scripted gross-out comedy with four Chinese-American women fully lives up and down to its description. With Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim as debuting director, it’s also another demographically pioneering work. Read more... |
Meg 2: The Trench review - into the jaws of tediumSaturday, 05 August 2023![]()
Big bitey sharks and prehistoric monsters have tantalised the imaginations of summer moviegoers for decades, from Jules Verne to Jaws. James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water and the director’s recent scientific commentary on the OceanGate submersible disaster also serve to underline the public fascination with the dangerous deep. Read more... |
Paris Memories review - recalling the terror, bit by bitWednesday, 02 August 2023![]()
People have been making films about the unreliability of memory since, oh, I can’t remember. Often it’s a cue for a genre escapade, but here French filmmaker Alice Winocour gives us a social drama, telling the fictional story of a survivor of the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130. Read more... |
Baato review - Nepalese mountain folk await big changes with excitement and anxietySunday, 30 July 2023![]()
It doesn’t do to be in a hurry in Nepal. In Baato, directors Kate Stryker and Lucas Millard follow Mikma and her family as they travel 300 kilometres from their mountain village in Eastern Nepal to the town of Terai. It takes the best part of a week for the five adults, two boys, and two dogs to walk the narrow paths until they reach the unpaved road where they can board rickety buses or jeeps to complete their journey. Read more... |
The Beanie Bubble review - an under-stuffed, misshapen product sagaSaturday, 29 July 2023![]()
Another week, another toy story, in the wake of Barbie. And another origin-of-hit-product story, too, after Air. The Beanie Bubble, though, has none of the surprisingly gripping appeal of Nike’s rise and rise via a single trainer design, nor the (sporadic) wit and bounce of Greta Gerwig’s mega-hit. It’s all corporate idiocy, shabby dealings, and misogyny. And failure is nowhere near as fascinating as success. Read more... |
Talk to Me review - teens tempt fate in Aussie alienation allegorySaturday, 29 July 2023![]()
Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover. Read more... |
Everybody Loves Jeanne review - charmingly weird romantic comedyWednesday, 26 July 2023![]()
Céline Devaux, known for her award-winning short films, wrote, directed and drew the animations for her charming, funny debut feature, which takes the concept of the critical inner voice and runs with it. Blanche Gardin is brilliant as Jeanne, whose revolutionary invention, a structure that traps and removes microplastics from the ocean - it's called Nausicaa, which doesn't bode well - ends up as a dismal failure at its launch. Read more... |
My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock review - a sly primerSunday, 23 July 2023![]()
Mark Cousins pulled off a coup for his latest film history documentary, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, by getting the great director to narrate it. In his catarrhal East London drawl, Hitchcock parses dozens of the brilliant visual techniques he used to elicit emotional responses in his movies' audiences, as Cousins cuts rapidly from one memorable excerpt to another. Quite a feat since Hitchcock died 43 years ago. Read more... |
Oppenheimer review - epic and enthralling study of 'the father of the atomic bomb'Thursday, 20 July 2023![]()
With a track record that includes Memento, Dunkirk, Insomnia and Inception, Christopher Nolan is not a filmmaker who could be accused of a lack of ambition, but even by his standards Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement. Read more... |
Barbie review - uneasy blend of farce and feminismWednesday, 19 July 2023![]()
The prologue to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie augurs well. A gaggle of young girls in a rocky desert are playing with doll-babies while enacting the mind-numbing drudgery of the early 20th century housewife. Then a new godhead arrives, a giant pretty blonde whose stilettoed feet turn slightly inwards. The girls go into a frenzy of old-doll-smashing, Also Sprach Zarathustra swells up and one girl throws her doll high in the air. Read more... |
A Kind of Kidnapping review - claustrophobic class-division satireSaturday, 15 July 2023![]()
A Kind of Kidnapping is a low-budget British comedy with a neat premise and satirical view of class and politics in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Read more... |
Medusa review - stylish, smart, seriously strange Brazilian satireSaturday, 15 July 2023![]()
“There are sex maniacs out there, sodomites, murderers, suicidal people, and communists on the loose! I vote for a curfew!” Read more... |
The Damned Don't Cry review - a Moroccan mother and son on the marginsFriday, 07 July 2023![]()
British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa’s second feature is a departure from his first, the brilliant and disturbing Lynn + Lucy of 2020. That was set on an Essex housing estate; this one takes place in Morocco. Read more... |
Shabu review - documentary-drama about youngsters in RotterdamFriday, 07 July 2023![]()
This loose-limbed movie follows Shabu, a 14-year-old boy who is growing up on the public housing estate known as the Peperklip (Paperclip) in Rotterdam. It’s the summer holidays and he’d like to hang out with his girlfriend and his mates, but first he’s got to sort out some trouble. Read more... |
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One review - buckle upThursday, 06 July 2023![]()
After 27 years and half a dozen instalments of a franchise predicated on its ability to up the ante on itself to ever more dizzying heights of ingenious, character-driven, genuinely heart-in-mouth action, the killjoy or cynic may well be lining up an alternative title for the latest: Mission: Impossible – Anti-climax. But they would never get to use it. Not a chance. Read more... |
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