Film
Military Wives review - the surprising true story of the women who rocked the chartsThursday, 05 March 2020
There’s a lot of plucky British charm to Military Wives, from Peter Cattaneo, the director who won the nation's heart with his debut film The Full Monty over two decades ago. His latest offering, starring Kristen Scott Thomas and... Read more... |
Escape from Pretoria review - fun but facile prison-break dramaWednesday, 04 March 2020
Based on the book by former political prisoner Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria is an intermittently engaging jailbreak tale set in South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as further evidence of Daniel Radcliffe’s determination to run... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Raining in the MountainTuesday, 03 March 2020
King Hu is the original master of wuxia or martial arts films – visual feasts of balletic conflict and near-slapstick humour – and this 1979 film is one of his best, though perhaps less well-known than Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1971) and... Read more... |
True History of the Kelly Gang review - anarchy in OzMonday, 02 March 2020
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Justin Kurzel’s wild investigation of the Kelly myth, Australian manhood and nationhood carves out its own... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Valerie and Her Week of WondersSunday, 01 March 2020
Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders contains many mysteries, the main one being exactly how such a strange and subversive film could have been released in 1970, so soon after the Prague Spring. That the author on whose 1935 novel the... Read more... |
Downhill review - American remake wanders off-pisteSaturday, 29 February 2020
It’s hard to believe that Jesse Armstrong (Succession, Veep) co-wrote the screenplay for this feeble American remake of Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2014). Where Force Majeure is subtle, dark and original (never have electric... Read more... |
Portrait of a Lady on Fire review – love unshackledFriday, 28 February 2020
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is windblown, spare, taut, and sensual – a haunted seaside romantic drama, set in the 18th century, that makes most recent films and series dressed in period costumes seem like party-line effusions of empty style and... Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: Never Rarely Sometimes Always review - raw and unflinching abortion drama hits homeFriday, 28 February 2020
Back in 2017, writer-director Eliza Hittman won over audiences with her beautiful coming-of-age drama Beach Rats. Her latest film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, is a more quietly devastating drama, shifting the focus away from sexual... Read more... |
Dark Waters review - an ominous drama with plenty of backbone, but not enough fleshFriday, 28 February 2020
Watching Dark Waters, the latest film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), I kept thinking — what’s the opposite of a love letter? The film is based on the work of Rob Bilott, a real-life lawyer who uncovered a corruption scandal so... Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: Berlin Alexanderplatz review - a contemporary twist on a classicThursday, 27 February 2020
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner... Read more... |
Push review – lifting the lid on the housing crisisWednesday, 26 February 2020
Italian journalist Roberto Saviano still lives in fear of his life 11 years after writing Gomorrah, which explores how criminal gangs use tax havens to launder money. “You make 100 million euros from trafficking cocaine or migrants,” he explains, “... Read more... |
Actress Noémie Merlant: 'This is something that hasn't been told yet'Tuesday, 25 February 2020
Lest anyone believe that Parasite was the only ground-breaking foreign language film of the past year, Céline Sciamma’s fourth feature, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, arrives to remind us otherwise. Like Parasite, it... Read more... |
