Film
Hard Truths review - a bravura, hyperreal performance from Marianne Jean-BaptisteFriday, 31 January 2025
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Stray DogTuesday, 04 February 2025
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a... Read more... |
Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV eventFriday, 31 January 2025
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the... Read more... |
By the Stream review - enigmatic Korean dramaThursday, 30 January 2025
“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was... Read more... |
Flight Risk review - the sky's the limit for Michelle Dockery and Mark WahlbergSaturday, 25 January 2025
Director Mel Gibson probably made Flight Risk with Netflix’s “90-minute movies” slot in mind (in fact he overshot – it lasts 91 minutes). It hits the spot of “escapist no-brainer action flick” by being lean, sharply-focused and amusingly... Read more... |
Presence review - Soderbergh's haunted cameraSaturday, 25 January 2025
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled... Read more... |
The Brutalist review - we're building to somethingThursday, 23 January 2025
There’s a moment, as we build to a climax in Brady Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), when a servant at a grand house unwittingly nudges a candle into the path of a dangling curtain pull. The tassel ignites, unseen by gathering... Read more... |
William Tell review - stirring action adventure with silly dialogueWednesday, 22 January 2025
Despite Rossini’s banger of an overture and a Looney Tunes cartoon starring Daffy Duck as William Tell, I’ll wager that few non-German-speakers can recite the precise details of the Swiss folk hero’s legend. Beyond, that is, describing him as a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Mikey and NickyTuesday, 21 January 2025
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once,... Read more... |
David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)Monday, 20 January 2025
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years... Read more... |
A Complete Unknown review - how does it feel?Friday, 17 January 2025
Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to... Read more... |
Vermiglio review - a simple tale, simply but beautifully toldFriday, 17 January 2025
Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a woman faking sex but the angelic breathing of three young sisters sharing a bed in the snowy Alto Adige.It’s 1944, and Italy... Read more... |
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