Film
Emilia Perez review - Audiard's beguiling musical tribute to Mexico's womenThursday, 24 October 2024
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by... Read more... |
Dahomey review - return of the kingWednesday, 23 October 2024
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and... Read more... |
Milisuthando review - exorcising apartheidTuesday, 22 October 2024
“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinemaTuesday, 22 October 2024
You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore. It was first used to describe a crop of horror films... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early WorksTuesday, 22 October 2024
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated... Read more... |
Since Yesterday review - championing a neglected female music sceneMonday, 21 October 2024
Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands is one of those films that, perhaps embarrassingly, feels very necessary. An examination of the history of solely all female bands in Scotland since the 1960s, it is a great demonstration of... Read more... |
The Wild Robot - beasts and bot bond, graduallyMonday, 21 October 2024
Is it mere coincidence or already a new trend? Animated films about the unlikely friendships between robots and animals are thriving. Earlier this year, Pablo Berger's heart-warming retro tale Robot Dreams proved that fur and metal can go... Read more... |
Smile 2 review - worthy follow up to runaway hitSaturday, 19 October 2024
No film tackles the knotty topic of inherited mental illness with as much gleeful abandon as Smile. Mental health has been a popular subtext in contemporary horror for the past decade, but Parker Finn's Smile felt refreshing in how unsubtle it was.... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Daniel Craig, Amy Adams, Twiggy, Christopher Reeve and some snailsFriday, 18 October 2024
QueerWilliam Burroughs’ eponymous novel was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, but it has finally reached the screen under the helmsmanship of Luca Guadagnino. It bombards the viewer from a variety of angles and leaves plenty of treacherous... Read more... |
The Apprentice review - from chump to TrumpFriday, 18 October 2024
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The... Read more... |
The Crime Is Mine review - entertaining froth from a crack castThursday, 17 October 2024
For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t... Read more... |
Woman of the Hour, Netflix review - gripping drama follows a true-life Seventies serial killerThursday, 17 October 2024
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend... Read more... |
