Film Reviews
Aftermath, review - 'Schwarzenegger acts!'Saturday, 08 April 2017
Arnie acts! Like “Garbo laughs,” there are some things you learn never to expect, and a credible, committed Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a grief-stricken construction worker is high among them. His role as a melancholy father dealing with his daughter’s impending transformation into a murderous zombie in Maggie (2015) was the first indication of a new direction. Read more... |
I Am Not Your Negro, review - 'powerful portrait of James Baldwin'Saturday, 08 April 2017
The Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a chronicle of the pioneering writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin. Its director Raoul Peck mirrors the intellectual challenge that Baldwin set his audience: the film demands that you pay close attention and listen to a complex argument backed up visually with diverse social and cultural references. Read more... |
A Quiet Passion, review - 'Cynthia Nixon is an indrawn Emily Dickinson'Friday, 07 April 2017
Is there something about the recessive life of Emily Dickinson that defies dramatisation? I'm beginning to think so after A Quiet Passion. The Terence Davies film may attempt a more authentic take on the unrelievedly bleak, and also great, 19th-century American poet than the stage vehicle about her, The Belle of... Read more... |
Neruda, review - 'poetry and politics'Friday, 07 April 2017
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry... Read more... |
City of Tiny Lights, review - 'Riz Ahmed sleuths in self-aware London noir'Wednesday, 05 April 2017
The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is... Read more... |
Mad To Be Normal, review - David Tennant is electric as RD LaingTuesday, 04 April 2017
“What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?” Angie (a flirty, engaging Elizabeth Moss) is about to give birth to psychiatrist RD Laing’s baby, and you have to agree that it’s not the wisest plan. Read more... |
Free Fire review - 'entertaining massacre with superb cast'Friday, 31 March 2017
Ben Wheatley’s sixth film in a prolific, unpredictable career is a shoot-‘em-up in the most literal sense. Setting a superb international cast led by Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy down in a big, grim warehouse, he lets them blast bits off each other for 70 of Free Fire’s 90 minutes. Read more... |
Graduation review - 'Cannes winner is a bleak Romanian masterpiece'Thursday, 30 March 2017
A decade ago Romanian director Cristian Mungiu took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a gruelling abortion drama set in the dying days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The cold intensity of that film made it a key work in the remarkable movement that came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, which directed a pitiless eye at the reality of the country as it struggled... Read more... |
Ghost in the Shell review - 'a mind-bending futuristic dystopia'Wednesday, 29 March 2017
The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies. Read more... |
Aquarius review - 'the unease of contemporary Brazil'Saturday, 25 March 2017
Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement... Read more... |
Life review - 'knuckle-gnawing moments of panic'Thursday, 23 March 2017
In space, no-one can hear you say “hang on, haven’t I seen this before?” The sprawling, labyrinthine space ship full of ducts and passageways for terrifying creatures to hide in, the laid-back crew who’ve become a little too blasé about life in space, the cute little outer-space organism that looks like an exotic novelty pet… Read more... |
The Lost City of ZTuesday, 21 March 2017
Percy Fawcett: does the name ring a bell? He ought by rights to sit in the pantheon of boys’ own explorers alongside Cook and Ross, Parry and Franklin, Livingstone and Mungo Park, Scott and Shackleton. Either side of the Great War, he returned again and again to the impenetrable South American interior, in pursuit of an ancient Amazonian civilisation which he called Z. Read more... |
The SalesmanSaturday, 18 March 2017
"Attention must be paid," we are famously told near the close of Death of a Salesman. And so it was this year on Oscar night when Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (A Separation was the first), this time for a movie that leans heavily on ... Read more... |
Personal ShopperThursday, 16 March 2017
What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more. Read more... |
Beauty and the BeastMonday, 13 March 2017
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. Read more... |
Elle review - sexual violence, black humour and satireWednesday, 08 March 2017
As Elle’s director Paul Verhoeven put it, “we realised that no American actress would ever take on such an immoral movie.” However, Isabelle Huppert didn’t hesitate, and has delivered a performance of such force and boldness that even the disarming Oscar-winner Emma Stone might secretly... Read more... |
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