Film Reviews
Venom: The Last Dance review - Tom Hardy's people-eater bows outSaturday, 26 October 2024![]()
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria CallasThursday, 24 October 2024![]()
Maria Read more... |
Emilia Perez review - Audiard's beguiling musical tribute to Mexico's womenThursday, 24 October 2024![]()
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar. Read more... |
Dahomey review - return of the kingWednesday, 23 October 2024![]()
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries. Read more... |
Milisuthando review - exorcising apartheidTuesday, 22 October 2024![]()
“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia. Read more... |
Since Yesterday review - championing a neglected female music sceneMonday, 21 October 2024![]()
Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands is one of those films that, perhaps embarrassingly, feels very necessary. An examination of the history of solely all female bands in Scotland since the 1960s, it is a great demonstration of how little seems to have changed, particularly when it comes to the industry’s perceived "risk" when backing these groups. Read more... |
The Wild Robot - beasts and bot bond, graduallyMonday, 21 October 2024![]()
Is it mere coincidence or already a new trend? Animated films about the unlikely friendships between robots and animals are thriving. Earlier this year, Pablo Berger's heart-warming retro tale Robot Dreams proved that fur and metal can go a long way when it comes to creating a kids' film that is in touch with the times. In The Wild Robot, things are a little more complicated: machines and feral creatures get to learn from each other the hard way. Read more... |
Smile 2 review - worthy follow up to runaway hitSaturday, 19 October 2024![]()
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was. The premise was a curse that drives you mad with violent hallucinations that eventually force you to kill yourself, passing the curse on to whoever witnesses your death. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Daniel Craig, Amy Adams, Twiggy, Christopher Reeve and some snailsFriday, 18 October 2024![]()
Queer Read more... |
The Apprentice review - from chump to TrumpFriday, 18 October 2024![]()
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain. Read more... |
The Crime Is Mine review - entertaining froth from a crack castThursday, 17 October 2024![]()
For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t that nourishing, even though he adds some crunchier elements along the way. Read more... |
Woman of the Hour, Netflix review - gripping drama follows a true-life Seventies serial killerThursday, 17 October 2024![]()
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again. Read more... |
Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assistedWednesday, 16 October 2024![]()
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told. Read more... |
Salem’s Lot review - listless King remakeSunday, 13 October 2024![]()
A boy’s dead friend scratching at his first-floor window, Nosferatu-like vampire Barlow rearing up with heart attack shock…The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV take on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot scared a teen generation out of their skins. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - the Vatican, the Blitz, a trip to Poland and a surfin' nightmareSaturday, 12 October 2024![]()
Conclave Read more... |
The Last of the Sea Women review - a moving tale of feisty traditional diversSaturday, 12 October 2024![]()
“The ocean is our home… Even in my next life I will dive again,” says Geum Ok, one of a band of female divers from Jeju, a volcanic island 60 miles south of the Korean peninsular. Read more... |
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