Film
Mulan review - Niki Caro's live action take on the '98 classic underwhelmsFriday, 04 September 2020
Whilst New Mutants slips surreptitiously into cinemas, Disney’s live-action spin on Mulan arrives with more fanfare on their streaming platform, even if it does come with a price-tag of nearly £20.Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider... Read more... |
I'm Thinking of Ending Things review - only disconnectThursday, 03 September 2020
I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a... Read more... |
New Mutants review - superheroes and the supernatural collideThursday, 03 September 2020
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film. Now, with... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Show Boat (1936)Tuesday, 01 September 2020
Stretching from the 1880s through the 1920s, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Show Boat, about three generations of entertainers aboard a Mississippi steamer, became the 1928 Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein musical, a part-musical 1929 film, next the 1936... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Safety Last!Sunday, 30 August 2020
Comparing Harold Lloyd with Keaton and Chaplin is difficult. Though the input he brought to his films was crucial, Lloyd didn’t write or direct, and there’s much discussion as to whether he was a genuine comedian or a straight actor playing the part... Read more... |
Hope Gap review - memories of a marriageSaturday, 29 August 2020
William Nicholson’s Shadowlands screenplay was his most devastating expression of English repression. His second film as director goes to the source, in this fictionalised account of his parents’ divorce, which he waited till they were dead to make... Read more... |
She Dies Tomorrow review - intimations of mortalitySaturday, 29 August 2020
Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t... Read more... |
Get Duked! review - briefly endearing, then a choreFriday, 28 August 2020
An endearing cast does what it can to keep Get Duked! aloft until writer-director Ninian Doff's movie sinks under the weight of too many wearisome shifts in tone. A coming-of-age film that is alternately silly and sentimental while wanting at times... Read more... |
Matthias & Maxime review - psychology and romance make for cinematic goldThursday, 27 August 2020
The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle... Read more... |
Tenet review - a heady delightWednesday, 26 August 2020
Go back over Christopher Nolan’s films and count the clocks. He has an obsession that would give a horologist a run for his money. Time is a continual motif of his body of work and it finds its zenith in his latest work Tenet. Beneath the... Read more... |
Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui: 'The disability community is the world community'Tuesday, 25 August 2020
In 2018, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui burst onto the documentary scene with McQueen, a visually stunning study of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Acclaim and offers followed, but no-one could have predicted the subject of... Read more... |
DVD: Fanny Lye Deliver'dTuesday, 25 August 2020
There’s something very familiar and also a little disappointing about Fanny Lye Deliver’d. Set in the years following the English Civil War, the story follows a young couple who enter the home of a stern, God-fearing family, disrupting their lives... Read more... |
