Film Reviews
Burning review - an explosive psychological thrillerSaturday, 02 February 2019
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. Read more...
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Crucible of the Vampire review - Neil Morrissey meets lesbian vampires, subtlySaturday, 02 February 2019
Ghosts of previous B-movies flit through this low-budget lesbian vampire flick. Part Hammer horror, J-horror, Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, it is ultimately about a young woman in a very large house full of unpleasant people out for her blood. Read more... |
Green Book review - is this Oscar hopeful too good to be true?Friday, 01 February 2019
With five nominations, Green Book is cruising optimistically towards Oscar night, but it’s not all plain sailing for director Peter Farrelly’s mixed-race fairy tale about a posh black musician and his thuggish Italian minder. Read more... |
Velvet Buzzsaw review - an acerbic takedown of the LA art sceneFriday, 01 February 2019
Sitting somewhere between Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Final Destination, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a satirical supernatural thriller that goes for the jugular of the LA art scene. Read more... |
The Mule review - good ol' boy rides againSaturday, 26 January 2019
Baggage can weigh a movie down. The Mule comes with quite a bit of baggage, and not just the kilos of coke stashed in the car’s trunk. Clint Eastwood’s fifty plus years as a screen icon turned director, his dodgy love life and libertarian politics all make it hard to walk into a cinema showing his latest film without dragging along a whole load of preconceptions. Read more... |
Vice review - Christian Bale on surging and satiric formFriday, 25 January 2019
Satire was once thought in America to be that thing that closed on Saturday night. Not here: filmmaker Adam McKay goes the distance with Vice, a hurtling examination of realpolitik that puts Dick Cheney under a spotlight at once satiric and scary. Do we have Dubya's onetime veep to thank for the subsequent rise of Trump and the parlous state of affairs Stateside since then? Read more... |
On Her Shoulders review - half-life of a campaignerFriday, 25 January 2019
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still. Read more... |
Van Woerkum, BBCPO, Gernon, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a symphony of cinemaMonday, 21 January 2019
In contrast to a classic film soundtrack played live with the film, the idea in "symphonic cinema" is that the music, and its interpretation, come first. So the conductor is literally setting the pace, and to some extent the atmosphere, while the film is controlled in real time by an "image soloist", and the visuals follow the music’s lead rather than the other way round. Read more... |
Mary Queen of Scots review - Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie excelSaturday, 19 January 2019
Very much a woman of today, the Catholic Stuart heroine (Saoirse Ronan) of Mary Queen of Scots frequently hacks her way out of a thicket of power-hungry males, enjoys it when her English suitor Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden) goes down on her, and is amused when her gay secretary and minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova)... Read more... |
Glass review - shattered Shyamalan sequelSaturday, 19 January 2019
M Night Shyamalan is the Orson Welles of twist-ending fantasy, forever condemned to reach back to his first two successes. The Sixth Sense still stands alone, though its haunted chill shivers through much recent horror. Read more... |
Monsters and Men review - an impressive debutSaturday, 19 January 2019
This well-crafted addition to the films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is subtler and less commercial than last year’s The Hate U Give but covers similar terrain. Write... Read more... |
Beautiful Boy review - well-acted but a slogFriday, 18 January 2019
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. Read more... |
Colette review - Keira Knightley thrives in ParisThursday, 10 January 2019
In a telling scene midway through Colette, our lead is told that rather than get used to marriage, it is “better to make marriage get used to you.” In this retelling of the remarkable Colette’s rise, it is evident she did much more than that; by the time she was done, all of Paris was moulded in her image, and in Keira Knightley's hands, it’s no mystery why. Read more... |
Life Itself review - epically vapidSaturday, 05 January 2019
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade: that bromide is about the only one absent from the astonishingly bad Life Itself, which in actuality might require a stiff drink to make it through the film intact. Read more... |
Welcome to Marwen review - Carell and Zemeckis fail to hit strideSaturday, 05 January 2019
In the proverbial melting pot, this film has all the right ingredients. Read more... |
An Impossible Love review - toxic romance across the yearsFriday, 04 January 2019
This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Read more... |
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