Film Reviews
January review - the end is nigh in vampirised BulgariaWednesday, 01 February 2023
At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has? Read more... |
The Fabelmans review - Spielberg remembers with wit and wonderSaturday, 28 January 2023
Spielberg sometimes directed The Fabelmans through a film of tears, as he recreated his cinema’s origins. Lightly fictionalising his own family history, it turns an autobiographical key to previous films, while being fundamentally different to anything he’s made before. Read more... |
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed review - superb documentary about a campaigning artistFriday, 27 January 2023
A film telling just the story of photographer Nan Goldin’s campaign against Purdue Pharmacy would have been worth the ticket price alone. Read more... |
The Last Stage review - a former prisoner returns to the death campFriday, 27 January 2023
Seventy-eight years ago, on January 27,1945, Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army. The iconic images of the ovens with charred skulls and emaciated survivors peering through barbed wire were filmed by Russian cameramen over the following weeks and not on the day itself. And from the very beginning, there was a degree of staging in what the world was shown. Read more... |
DVD: Oscar Peterson - Black + WhiteTuesday, 24 January 2023
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD. Read more... |
Babylon review - sound and fury in silent HollywoodSunday, 22 January 2023
Babylon is sensational, a manic, pounding assault on the senses meant to convey Hollywood’s chaotic birth. Damien Chazelle’s return to La La Land’s showbiz dreams forsakes ineffable intimacy for hysterical thunder, and for much of the time that’s enough. Read more... |
The Substitute review - a Buenos Aires 'Blackboard Jungle'Saturday, 21 January 2023
If, as a teacher newly hired to instil an appreciation for literature in underprivileged high-school kids who think it’s useless, you don’t march into their classroom and try to ram Jorge Luis Borges down their throats. That’s one lesson learned by Lucio Garmendia (Juan Minujín) in Diego Lerman’s The Substitute. Read more... |
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel review - intriguing portrait of the end of an eraSaturday, 21 January 2023
The documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel has captured a particular moment in time. A few long-term residents of the legendary building at 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan are still hanging in there after several years of constant and oppressive building noise. Read more... |
More than Ever - an idyllic way of dyingFriday, 20 January 2023
We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows. Read more... |
Holy Spider review - problematic portrait of an Iranian serial killerFriday, 20 January 2023
Timing is everything. The release of Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider at a time when the world’s attention is turned to the treatment of women in Iran should win it more ticket sales than his previous (and far better) film Border managed in 2019. Read more... |
Tár review - a towering Cate Blanchett conducts a classicFriday, 13 January 2023
Perhaps Michael Haneke led the way with The Piano Teacher. But it’s still surprising to find a film set in the rarefied world of classical music that can be taut and mysterious, while dealing with such urgent contemporary issues as workplace abuse and cancel culture, and introducing one of the most complex, compelling film characters in years. Read more... |
Enys Men review - mystifying Seventies Cornish folk horrorThursday, 12 January 2023
Unlike the black and white Bait, Mark Jenkin’s highly acclaimed previous film, Enys Men (stone island in Cornish) is full of colour. Strange, saturated colour that doesn’t look quite real: a deep blue sea, a bright red raincoat, yellow gorse against brown bracken. And the flowers around which this abstract plot revolves don’t look real either. Such elongated stems and waxy white petals look like they come from outer space, not a windy Cornish coastline. Read more... |
Empire of Light review - cinema of broken dreamsSunday, 08 January 2023
Sam Mendes assembled most of the ingredients necessary to make Empire of Light a wrenching English melodrama with a potent social theme. The stars are Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Micheal Ward and Toby Jones. Mendes teamed with his usual cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose elegant panoramic images lend a grandeur to Margate’s faded glory. The town’s art deco Dreamland Cinema provided the main location of a movie admirably modest in scale. Read more... |
A Man Called Otto review - Tom Hanks stars but doesn't sparkleFriday, 06 January 2023
There are going to be people who enjoy A Man Called Otto I’m sure, but it’s definitely not a film for hardened cynics or Tom Hanks' finest hour. It’s a remake of 2017’s Swedish black comedy, A Man called Ove – itself based on a popular novel. Read more... |
Corsage review - Vicky Krieps is superb as Empress Elisabeth of AustriaFriday, 30 December 2022
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her? Read more... |
The Pale Blue Eye review - telltale heartsTuesday, 27 December 2022
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit. Read more... |
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