Film Reviews
Hopper: An American Love Story review - a dry view of a much richer subjectTuesday, 18 October 2022
This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2022 - women's voices powerfully to the foreMonday, 17 October 2022
Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema. Read more... |
Halloween Ends review - the final cutMonday, 17 October 2022
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here. Read more... |
All That Breathes review - intensely moving nature documentarySaturday, 15 October 2022
This extraordinarily moving film made history when it became the first documentary to win the top non-fiction awards at both Sundance and Cannes. All that Breathes is the second film directed by Shaunak Sen, shot in Delhi in 2019/2020 during the violence that followed the Citizenship Amendment Act Read more... |
London Film Festival 2022 - supermodels, juntas and toxic dust cloudsThursday, 13 October 2022
There were decidedly mixed, north-south emotions on the film festival circuit last week: just as the latest edition of the BFI London Film Festival opened, administrators announced the immediate closure of its illustrious UK cousin, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, along with two of Scotland’s most beloved cinemas. Read more... |
The Lost King review - fact or fiction?Tuesday, 11 October 2022
Richard III is a controversial figure, and will remain so after this film, which tells the remarkable story of how Philippa Langley, a woman with no background in academia, archaeology or as a historian, led the search to find the grave of the “usurper king”. Read more... |
Amsterdam review - Christian Bale lights the way into a fuzzy misfire's kind heartSunday, 09 October 2022
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm. Read more... |
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris review - Lesley Manville as a Fifties charlady with a heart of goldSaturday, 01 October 2022
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, is preposterous. But it’s as pretty as a pink cloud. The director, Anthony Fabian, knows that in these grim times, escapism is good box office. Read more... |
Remote review - an irredeemably silly first featureSaturday, 01 October 2022
Remote is Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film. The New York-based artist was commissioned by Artangel, an organisation renowned for its promotion of interesting projects. Support also comes from art institutions across the world – Beijing, Denmark, Korea, Louisiana, Montreal and Stockholm. Read more... |
Blonde review - Marilyn Monroe thrown to the wolvesFriday, 30 September 2022
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and washed down with Scotch in her Los Angeles bungalow. Read more... |
In Front of Your Face review - a day in the lifeWednesday, 28 September 2022
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career. Read more... |
Juniper review - a classic role for Charlotte RamplingSaturday, 24 September 2022
Juniper provides, above all, an absolutely unforgettable role for Charlotte Rampling. New Zealander Matthew J Saville, who devised the script and directed the film, based her character, Ruth, on his own feisty and well-travelled grandmother, who had led a full life, and then returned home – where she drank substantial quantities of gin every day. Read more... |
Don’t Worry Darling review - dystopian thriller dries up in the desertFriday, 23 September 2022
Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her exceptional directorial debut Booksmart has been highly anticipated and, of late, accompanied by a torrent of behind-the-scenes bad press and viral virulence. It would be nice to report that the thriller itself transcends all the noise; but, despite yet another exceptional performance by Florence Pugh, it’s a misfiring, undernourished, disappointing affair. Read more... |
Silent Land review - an inconvenient death mars their holidayFriday, 23 September 2022
How people dance always gives them away. Alone on the floor of a Sardinian coastal nitespot in Silent Land, the bourgeois Polish couple Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieska Żulewska) fling themselves around as dementedly as if red ants are swarming on their bodies. Read more... |
Bloody Oranges review - a gruesome and gruelling French social satireMonday, 19 September 2022
Oh no. Not that orange knife and male genitals thing again. In 1976, Marco Ferreri set La Dernière Femme in Créteil in the outskirts of Paris – I was working in a school there, so the memory does tend to stick – and set out to shock audiences by having the main character, played by a young Gérard Depardieu, cut off his life expectancy with the aid of a Moulinex electric kitchen knife. Read more... |
Funny Pages review - comic-book confidentialSaturday, 17 September 2022
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist. Read more... |
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