Film
The Father review - gripping dementia dramaFriday, 11 June 2021
Florian Zeller: the name might not be familiar in the world of cinema. But watch this space. His stage play Le Père was widely praised, made its way to Broadway and, following the success, the young French director has adapted it into The Father, a... Read more... |
Nobody review - Bob Odenkirk reinvents himself as all-action dynamoFriday, 11 June 2021
Fans of Bob Odenkirk’s work in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul will be delighted to see him taking centre stage in Ilya Naishuller’s thriller, but perhaps bamboozled at the spectacle of Odenkirk taking the plunge into the blood-splattered... Read more... |
Shiva Baby review - sex, lies and rugelachFriday, 11 June 2021
Comedian Rachel Sennott stars as Danielle, a conflicted, bisexual twenty-something college student who's taking money she doesn't really need from a sugar daddy who isn't who she thinks he is. Emma Seligman’s debut feature, which began as a short in... Read more... |
Bank Job review - an inspirational look at financeWednesday, 09 June 2021
A fun film about finance – really? From the very first frame I was hooked on this can-do documentary; it’s that good. A young family – parents, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, two kids and two dogs – gather at the front door of their Victorian... Read more... |
Dark Days, Luminous Nights, Manchester Collective, The White Hotel, Salford review - a sense of HadesTuesday, 08 June 2021
Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The World of Wong Kar WaiSunday, 06 June 2021
There is an irony in the fact that the most celebrated of auteurs to emerge during Hong Kong’s "Second Wave" of directors in the 1980s did not originate from within the bounds of the administrative region. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai was the son... Read more... |
A Quiet Place Part II review - noise abatement sequelFriday, 04 June 2021
Fourteen months after the Manhattan premiere of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place Part II – and three years after his taut, spare original spawned the most suspenseful sci-fi horror franchise of recent times – the movie is setting post-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Fast Times at Ridgemont HighTuesday, 01 June 2021
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless)... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Jungle FeverSunday, 30 May 2021
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough... Read more... |
Surge review - jittery and joylessSaturday, 29 May 2021
Seventeen years after Ben Whishaw shot to attention playing Hamlet, this terrific actor is again playing someone "mad-north-northwest". Marking TV director Aneil Karia's feature film debut, Surge casts Whishaw as a jittery wreck called Joseph, whose... Read more... |
First Cow review - beautifully realised frontier dramaFriday, 28 May 2021
Kelly Reichardt is one of America’s most distinctive directors, whose meticulously detailed, character and place-driven dramas have a lowkey vibe that belies their impact. Not many directors could make a yarn about a couple of baking entrepreneurs... Read more... |
Frankie review - dying for nuanceThursday, 27 May 2021
American filmmaker Ira Sachs excels at crafting throughtful relationship dramas in which middle-class characters confronted with crises or unanticipated realisations gain valuable emotional knowledge. His best works – Forty Shades of Blue (2005),... Read more... |
