Film
Blu-ray: Drugstore CowboyTuesday, 25 February 2025
Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy maps out the territory between... Read more... |
The Monkey review - a grisly wind-upSaturday, 22 February 2025
Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The... Read more... |
I'm Still Here review - powerful tale of repression and resistanceFriday, 21 February 2025
Just like Britain’s ‘stiff upper lip’, that indominable spirit in the face of adversity, Brazil has a dominant personality trait – open-hearted, ebullient – that tends to obscure the reality of its many social, economic and political travails. ... Read more... |
Blu-ray: GolemTuesday, 18 February 2025
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an inanimate clay figure, brought to life when a magic word is placed inside its mouth. Piotr Szulkin’s dark 1979 film debut makes reference both to this legend and to Gustav Meyrink’s unsettling 1914 novel, moving the... Read more... |
Captain America: Brave New World review - talking loud, saying nothingFriday, 14 February 2025
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder.... Read more... |
Memoir of a Snail review - deliciously offbeat Australian animationFriday, 14 February 2025
Having recently watched the charming animation Marcelle The Shell With Shoes On with my nine-year-old son, I was going to suggest for our next movie night we check out Memoir of a Snail. Jolly fortunate that I didn’t, as this is a very different... Read more... |
To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustleFriday, 14 February 2025
The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through... Read more... |
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Bridget has started ditching the ditzThursday, 13 February 2025
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof on 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' - 'It became a question of self-respect'Wednesday, 12 February 2025
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013... Read more... |
Blu-ray: High and LowTuesday, 11 February 2025
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct... Read more... |
Bring Them Down review - ramming it home in the west of IrelandFriday, 07 February 2025
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden... Read more... |
September 5 review - gripping real-life thrillerThursday, 06 February 2025
There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.September 5 ... Read more... |
