Film
DVD/Blu-ray: The Tree of Wooden ClogsTuesday, 08 August 2017
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L’albero deli zoccoli) is a glorious fresco that reveals, over the course of an unhurried three hours and with a pronounced documentary element that virtually... Read more... |
'It was appealing to make a thriller about mental illness': Gareth Tunley and Alice Lowe on 'The Ghoul'Saturday, 05 August 2017
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s... Read more... |
Maudie review - intriguing and irritating in turnFriday, 04 August 2017
The little-known Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is the Maudie of the title of Aisling Walsh's grim-faced biopic, which feels frustratingly incomplete where it really counts. Sally Hawkins's committed occupancy of this sweet-faced if largely... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: WakefieldFriday, 04 August 2017
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral... Read more... |
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets review - Rihanna on pole can't save tiring space operaThursday, 03 August 2017
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets starts promisingly: there’s Bowie’s Space Oddity on the soundtrack (a bit clichéd but evocative) and a sly montage of personnel handovers at an international space station over the decades. Astronauts from... Read more... |
The Ghoul review - quietly unhinged British horrorWednesday, 02 August 2017
The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core. This sensibility is greatly helped by its star Tom Meeten, who as police detective Chris is haggard and run-down, ready... Read more... |
Williams review - much more than a film about motor racingWednesday, 02 August 2017
The sobriquet “the greatest living Englishman” has been applied to such diverse individuals as Keith Richards, Winston Churchill and Alan Bennett, but the bookies would surely offer reasonable odds on Sir Frank Williams. Having founded his current... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The LevellingTuesday, 01 August 2017
Hope Dickson Leach’s debut dissects lives in a wintry English landscape. The catastrophic 2014 floods in the Somerset Levels are the background to the return of Clover (Game of Thrones’ Ellie Kendrick) to a farmyard home which simmers with unspoken... Read more... |
The Wall review - action undercut by too much talkFriday, 28 July 2017
Movies which essentially consist of a central character trapped in a difficult predicament can be great (Tom Hardy in Locke), or more likely not so great (Colin Farrell in Phone Booth or Ryan Reynolds in Buried). In any event it’s not a challenge to... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Der müde TodFriday, 28 July 2017
"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds... Read more... |
The Big Sick review - enchanting romcom about mixed marriagesWednesday, 26 July 2017
The Big Sick is an enchanting film from the Judd Apatow comedy production line. Don’t be put off by the terrible title. There are two forms of sickness on display in the story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani American who plays himself in his own... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Terror in a Texas TownTuesday, 25 July 2017
Many of the best Westerns, that quintessentially American genre, are rooted in a Christian view of the world: the dark forces of Satan pitted against angels, saints and the figure of Christ the Redeemer. In Terror in a Texas Town, Joseph H Lewis's... Read more... |
