Film
Blu-ray: MorgianaSunday, 14 May 2023
The titular character in Juraj Herz’s Morgiana plays a peripheral though important role, some of the film’s most striking visual flourishes (courtesy of legendary cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera) being her point-of-view shots while she scurries in... Read more... |
Book Club: The Next Chapter review - lacklustre dialogue, clichéd plotThursday, 11 May 2023
I was once invited to join a book club by a bunch of friendly, clever women. But their conversation began with whether they liked the novel’s central characters enough to imagine having dinner with them and from there, descended into swapping tips... Read more... |
Brainwashed review - the toxic impact of the 'male gaze' in filmWednesday, 10 May 2023
The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that... Read more... |
The Blue Caftan review - unstitching repression in MoroccoWednesday, 10 May 2023
The eponymous garment in The Blue Caftan is a thing of beauty meticulously stitched and embroidered by Halim (Saleh Bakri), a maalem or master tailor, in one of Morocco’s oldest medinas. His craftmanship, with its focus on intricate... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Enys MenTuesday, 09 May 2023
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. ... Read more... |
Return to Seoul review - lost in translationMonday, 08 May 2023
Freddie (Park Ji-min) is a social hand grenade, flinging herself into situations to see where the splinters fall. Born in Korea but adopted and raised by French parents, a seemingly impulsive, brief detour to Seoul sees her seek out her birth-... Read more... |
The Dam review - a remarkably haunting allegorySunday, 07 May 2023
Maher (Maher el Khair, an actual brick-maker) works in a brickyard sloshing sticky mud into rectangular moulds with his bare hands. Next the mud bricks are tipped out to dry in the sun, before being fired in a large, wood fired kiln. The same... Read more... |
Harka review - when hope is a desertSunday, 07 May 2023
The incendiary topic of Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature Harka is poverty and corruption in Tunisia a decade after the failed promise of the Arab Spring.The word harka in the local Arabic dialect means either “to burn” or “to... Read more... |
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 review - raw and repetitive supergroup swansongSaturday, 06 May 2023
James Gunn is running the whole DC show now, but his Guardians films have stayed free from Cinematic Universe snares, even the group’s Avengers cameos beaming in from their own pop-art corner. This swansong is their indulgent, sometimes meandering... Read more... |
The Laureate review - a romp with Robert GravesSaturday, 06 May 2023
Nowadays Robert Graves is best known for his later and least interesting works on Greek myths and Roman emperors, but at his best, in the first decade of his writing life, as a war poet (Fairies and Fusiliers) and war memoirist (Good-Bye to All That... Read more... |
DVD: Jazz Fest - A New Orleans StorySaturday, 06 May 2023
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage... Read more... |
Love According to Dalva review - Belgian first time director tackles incestTuesday, 02 May 2023
What is it that drives Belgian filmmakers to make sad and disturbing films about children? Is it the influence of the Dardennes Brothers, who over a 20-year career have made superb features exploring how brutally society treats its most vulnerable (... Read more... |
