Film Reviews
My Old School review - a Glasgow schoolboy and his elaborate hoaxFriday, 19 August 2022
Back in 1995, the name Brandon Lee made the headlines. Not the Brandon Lee as in son of Bruce, who’d recently met his death on the set of The Crow, but a schoolboy who’d chosen to use the same name. A strange hoax was uncovered. Lee was, in fact, Brian MacKinnon, and he was not 16 but 32, posing as a fifth-former at the august Bearsden Academy in Glasgow.
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Eiffel review - sensuous secret historyFriday, 12 August 2022
This is a romantic historical epic with elan, giving sensual immediacy to a fanciful secret history of the Eiffel Tower, here inspired by a forbidden, rekindled romance between Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) and Arlette Bourgès (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey). Read more... |
Nope review - more a nope than a yepFriday, 12 August 2022
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s first two features were horror films with bells on, their genuinely creepy chills accompanied by sharp, satirical social comment. Both were so good that there seemed absolutely no reason to doubt the next. Read more... |
Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC review - cheap thrillsSaturday, 06 August 2022
Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived. Read more... |
Give Them Wings review - down but not out in DarlingtonSaturday, 06 August 2022
Give Them Wings is the biopic of Paul Hodgson, who seven months after he was born in 1965 was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. If that wasn’t bad enough, he survived his precarious childhood to become a devout fan of Durham’s hapless Darlington FC – it’s criminal that this low-budget British indie wasn’t titled Give Them Wingers. Read more... |
Our Eternal Summer review - tragedy taps authentic teenage emotions in MarseilleFriday, 05 August 2022
The French seaside has been the setting for all kinds of summer holiday capers. We are used to the idea that this is a place where young people set about finding out who they are. At the top of the quality spectrum are Éric Rohmer’s well-observed comedies of manners like Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996). Down at the bottom, there are shockers like Axelle Laffont’s Milf (2018). Read more... |
Bullet Train review - not really a first class ticketThursday, 04 August 2022
One of the best scenes in this Brad Pitt starrer takes place in the quiet car of a Japanese bullet train, as two men seek to kill each without leaving their seats or disturbing their fellow passengers. Aside from being amusingly and skilfully executed, the conceit lends the scene a restraint that is sorely missing from the rest of this cartoonishly hyper-active movie. Read more... |
Hit the Road review - leaving Tehran for truth and freedomSaturday, 30 July 2022
The trailer for Panah Panahi’s award-winning first feature Hit the Road is one of the most misleading I’ve yet seen thanks to its jaunty Western pop soundtrack and reassuring caption that the movie resembles an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine. Read more... |
The Fire of Love review - awe-inspiring footage of volcanoes marred by sentimental narrationSaturday, 30 July 2022
Katia and Maurice Krafft spent their married life going from one volcanic eruption to the next. These self-styled “volcano runners” were not just thrill seekers, but serious volcanologists keen to gain a better understanding of how volcanoes work so as to further science and save lives. Read more... |
Where the Crawdads Sing review - picturesque film glosses over its darker themesMonday, 25 July 2022
Derived from Delia Owens’s massively successful novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is the story of Kya Clark, a girl from an abusive, broken home in the North Carolina marshlands who raises herself almost single-handedly. The few people she encounters during her strange, isolated development from battered girlhood into a fragile young adult dismiss her mockingly as “Marsh Girl”. Read more... |
The Gray Man, Netflix review - the Russo brothers explore big-bang theorySaturday, 23 July 2022
Directed by the fraternal duo Anthony and Joseph Russo, who have helmed several of the colossally successful Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, The Gray Man ought at least to be entertaining and stuffed with blockbusterish thrills. Read more... |
The Good Boss review - Javier Bardem at his creepy bestWednesday, 20 July 2022
The Good Boss's Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) is not short of belief in his talents as a leader. Not just good, he evidently thinks he is the best boss ever. We watch him on the prowl, exerting influence and power over his family business, micro-managing everything and everyone. Read more... |
The Railway Children Return review - honourable wartime sequelSaturday, 16 July 2022
You can’t simulate nostalgia, or the dusting of urgent magic which made The Railway Children so immediately poignant. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the 1970 film with the same special affinity for vintage childhoods he showed in his heart-piercing ghost story The Amazing Mr Blunden (1972). Read more... |
McEnroe review - documentary about the original bad boy of tennisThursday, 14 July 2022
Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out? Read more... |
Thor: Love and Thunder review - more like it from MarvelSaturday, 09 July 2022
Twenty-eight films and 19 proliferating TV series in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was becoming wearisome, testing fans’ faith with grimly effortful new entries, and choking other sorts of film into the margins, like knotweed. But like the mid-20th century Western, superheroes are also a commercial template for anyone to tell any sort of story. When Taika Waititi’s dry satirist’s voice let rip on Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he combined all his and the genre’s wild virtues. Read more... |
Nitram review - chilling drama based on the Port Arthur gunmanThursday, 30 June 2022
Nitram, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s deeply disturbing film about the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, seems especially topical after the Uvalde school shootings, one among several other shootings in the US in May. Read more... |
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