fri 29/03/2024

Film Reviews

Murina review - her father, her jailer

Graham Fuller

Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his ruinous machismo, is clueless. The steps – based on love, desire, avarice, jealousy, manipulation and anger – make for a discomfiting coming-of-age drama that won the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year.

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The Outfit review - threadbare tailor-gangster yarn

Nick Hasted

“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be?

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Compartment No. 6 - strangers on a Russian train sweetly connect

Nick Hasted

Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner observes two strangers on a train, taking the arduous journey from Moscow to Arctic Murmansk in 1998. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student hoping to study ancient rock paintings, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) a skinhead Russian miner.

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DVD Special Feature: Abel Ferrara returns to the underground

Nick Hasted

Zeros And Ones’ poster alludes to Gerard Butler blockbusters (“The Vatican Has Fallen”), but Abel Ferrara’s name guarantees grungier fare. The sleaze of old Times Square still clings to the director, though he’s now a 70-year-old avant-pulp eminence living in Rome.

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The Audition review - love and hate at music school

Nick Hasted

If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music’s psychological cost might have resulted. Ina Weisse’s film is more incremental and naturalistic, as violin teacher Anna (Nina Hoss) gives special attention to teenage protégé Alexander (Ilja Monti), to the jealous resentment of son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev), while nervously returning to the stage herself.

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Morbius review – not so super

Daniel Baksi

Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.

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Oscars 2022 - the smack heard around the world

Matt Wolf

What the [expletive deleted]?

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Ambulance review – Michael Bay in excelsis

Nick Hasted

Speed in an ambulance? Gone In 60 Seconds meets Heat?

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The Worst Person in the World review - confusion becomes her

Graham Fuller

Some British TV viewers who were in junior school in the mid-1960s will recall the imported Australian kids’ show The Magic Boomerang. When the adolescent hero, a sheep farm kid, threw the eponymous piece of wood, he stopped time and was able to thwart crimes and right other wrongs as long as it was airborne; once he caught it, life continued as before in his corner of the Outback.

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The Tinderbox review – a call for peace

Daniel Baksi

The beginning of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is officially dated to 7 June 1967, the occasion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during the Six-Day War, but its origins stretch back further.

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X review - sex and the bloody American dream

Nick Hasted

Ti West’s slyly self-referential horror film about a Texan porn shoot subverts expectations.

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Three Floors review - nothing like good neighbours

Nick Hasted

A speeding drunk driver arrows down a silent street into a Roman block of flats.

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River review – gorgeous visuals and a timely message: so what’s not to like?

Sarah Kent

I would suggest watching River on the largest possible screen, so you can bask in the breathtaking beauty of the visuals.

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Paris,13th District review - millennial merry-go-round

Demetrios Matheou

Having established his world-class reputation with gritty crime thrillers, notably A Prophet, Jacques Audiard is clearly on a mission to branch out: after his terrific, revisionist western The Sisters Brothers, comes this ambling, sexy, millennial story about love, friendship, and the complicated areas in between.

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Deep Water review - not even laughably bad

Saskia Baron

Patricia Highsmith must be spinning in her grave. This ridiculously incompetent adaptation of her 1957 crime novel lacks all suspense or credibility. It’s hard to believe that Adrian Lyne, responsible for huge box-office hits like the provocative thriller Fatal Attraction and the dodgy but watchable 9 ½ Weeks and Indecent Proposal, could make something quite so feeble as Deep Water.

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The Phantom of the Open review - charmingly incompetent golfer channels Ealing

Nick Hasted

“No one can say you didn’t try,” shipyard worker Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is told, shortly before bluffing his way aged 46 into the 1976 British Open, having never played golf before.

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