Film Reviews
The Old Man and the Land review - dark secrets of a farming familyThursday, 03 October 2024
The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does it because he’s always done it, and because he doesn’t trust his 42-year-old daughter, Laura, despite her farming skills, or his 40-year-old son, David, the farm’s heir but an alcoholic and drug user who is unsuited to the work, to take it over. Read more... |
Megalopolis review - magic from cinema's dawnMonday, 30 September 2024
“What happens if you’ve overstepped your mandate?” aristocrat-architect Cesar Catalin (Adam Driver) is asked. “I’ll apologise,” he smirks. Francis Ford Coppola’s forty years in the making, self-financed epic is studded with such self-implicating bravado, including a wish to “escape into the ranks of the insane” rather than accept conventional thinking, as if at 85 he is not only Cesar but Kurtz, plunging chaotically upriver again, inviting career termination. Read more... |
The Teacher review - tense West Bank dramaSaturday, 28 September 2024
It’s hard not to review the Israeli occupation of Palestine when writing about The Teacher. The political context of this first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, who also wrote the screenplay, is so thoroughly appalling that it sometimes overshadows the TV-style melodrama onscreen. Read more... |
The Outrun review - Saoirse Ronan is astonishing as an alcoholic fighting for recoveryFriday, 27 September 2024
In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. Read more... |
Notes from Sheepland review - her farm is her canvasFriday, 20 September 2024
Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe. Read more... |
The Substance review - Demi Moore as an ageing Hollywood celeb with body issuesFriday, 20 September 2024
If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you. Read more... |
Strange Darling review - love really hurtsFriday, 20 September 2024
“Are you a serial killer?” asks a woman sitting in a pick up truck with a man she just met at a bar. The neon sign from the motel they are parked outside bathes the couple in cool, blue light. “Do you have any idea of the risks a woman like me takes every time she agrees to have a bit of fun?” Read more... |
The Goldman Case review - blistering French political dramaFriday, 20 September 2024
It’s a bold move to give a UK cinema release to this fierce courtroom drama about a French left-wing intellectual who was assassinated in1979. Pierre Goldman isn’t exactly a well-known figure on this side of the Channel, but perhaps the distributors hope that after the recent box-office success of Anatomy of A Fall and Saint Omer, there’s a whetted appetite for another forensic examination of the French legal system. Read more... |
My Favourite Cake review - woman, love, and freedomMonday, 16 September 2024
The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations. Read more... |
The Critic review - beware the acid-tipped penSaturday, 14 September 2024
The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous effect in The Shining. Read more... |
Lee review - shaky biopic of an iconic photographerFriday, 13 September 2024
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make a great biopic. Read more... |
Reawakening review - a prodigal daughter returns, or does she?Friday, 13 September 2024
“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t been seen since. Read more... |
Red Rooms review - the darkest of websTuesday, 10 September 2024
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. Read more... |
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrectionTuesday, 10 September 2024
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era. Read more... |
Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror filmMonday, 09 September 2024
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man. Read more... |
Firebrand review - surviving Henry VIIIFriday, 06 September 2024
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more successful examples of such retrofitting of the past. |
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