Film
Blu-ray: Chained for LifeSunday, 22 March 2020
The crass Disneyfication of the Beauty and the Beast tale crumbles in the face of Chained for Life. Starring Jess Weixler and Adam Pearson, writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s Altman-esque US indie – a low-key autumn 2019 release now available on a... Read more... |
Director Marjane Satrapi: ‘The real question is do you like everyone? No? So, why should everyone like you?’Friday, 20 March 2020
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and... Read more... |
The Truth review - a potent Franco-Japanese pairingWednesday, 18 March 2020
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Beat the DevilTuesday, 17 March 2020
Humphrey Bogart. John Huston. Gina Lollobrigida. Peter Lorre. Truman Capote! What could possibly go wrong? There’s the screenplay for starters: Capote gets top billing, and I’d long understood that he and Huston together wrote 1953's Beat the... Read more... |
Run review – wheels on fire in ScotlandSaturday, 14 March 2020
Run is the story of disgruntled 36-ish Finnie (Mark Stanley), a big, dour worker in a fish processing plant in the Aberdeenshire port of Fraserburgh – writer-director Scott Graham’s hometown. Long married to his onetime high-school sweetheart Katie... Read more... |
Calm with Horses review - a stirring debutFriday, 13 March 2020
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal,... Read more... |
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am review - a fitting tribute to a masterful storytellerFriday, 13 March 2020
When the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison died last year, it was a chance to celebrate the remarkable life of a storyteller who shook the literary establishment. Her work, including her debut novel The Bluest Eye, broke radical new... Read more... |
Misbehaviour review - crowd-pleaser tackles Seventies sexismThursday, 12 March 2020
Created in the mould of Made in Dagenham and Pride, Philippa Lowthrope offers up a cheery, kitschy British comedy centred around the 1970 Miss World Contest that was disrupted by feminist protests. Leading this crowd-pleaser are... Read more... |
And Then We Danced review - glorious Georgian gay coming-of-age taleWednesday, 11 March 2020
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Last HolidayTuesday, 10 March 2020
There’s a scarily prescient scene at the start of Henry Cass’s 1950 black comedy Last Holiday, a village surgery’s waiting room crammed with coughers and wheezers. Poor George Bird (Alec Guinness) is a tad under the weather too, but being mistakenly... Read more... |
Onward review - do you believe in magic?Friday, 06 March 2020
Welcome to New Mushroomton: a fantasy land that’s forgotten itself. This is how we’re introduced to Pixar’s Onward, which is set in a Dungeons & Dragons daydream of suburbia. Director Dan Scanlon’s film is a tribute to his late father, but it... Read more... |
The Photograph review - star-powered romance mostly simmers, sometimes soarsFriday, 06 March 2020
The Photograph, from writer-director Stella Meghie, tells twin tales. The first is all flashback and follows Christine (Chanté Adams, pictured below with Y'lan Noel), a young photographer balancing love and ambition. The second follows... Read more... |
