Film
Blu-ray: Identification of a WomanTuesday, 11 October 2022
Antonioni was a poet of enervated alienation, sold, like early Godard, by profoundly beautiful actors, and perfected in the sun-bleached lassitude of Monica Vitti’s search for her missing friend in L’Avventura (1960).He wandered the world after 1964... Read more... |
Amsterdam review - Christian Bale lights the way into a fuzzy misfire's kind heartSunday, 09 October 2022
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American... Read more... |
Blu-ray: NitramWednesday, 05 October 2022
Nitram is an object lesson in how to make a responsible film about a mass shooting, right down to not using the fame-seeking perpetrator’s real name as the title but the mocking ananym given to him by bullies at school.Scriptwriter Shaun Grant... Read more... |
Girl Picture review - Finnish coming-of-age drama offers nothing newMonday, 03 October 2022
What is it with pushy Finnish mums and their acrobatic teenage daughters? Just weeks after the release of the Gothic fantasy Hatching, which focused on a gymnast having a Cronenbergian breakdown under pressure from her influencer mother, comes... Read more... |
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris review - Lesley Manville as a Fifties charlady with a heart of goldSaturday, 01 October 2022
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel, is preposterous. But it’s as pretty as a pink cloud. The director, Anthony Fabian, knows that in these grim times, escapism is good box office.But still, would it hurt to get some... Read more... |
Remote review - an irredeemably silly first featureSaturday, 01 October 2022
Remote is Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film. The New York-based artist was commissioned by Artangel, an organisation renowned for its promotion of interesting projects. Support also comes from art institutions across the world – Beijing, Denmark... Read more... |
Blonde review - Marilyn Monroe thrown to the wolvesFriday, 30 September 2022
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and... Read more... |
In Front of Your Face review - a day in the lifeWednesday, 28 September 2022
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Love (Szerelem)Tuesday, 27 September 2022
Károly Makk’s Love (Szerelem) is full of silences and absences, this 1971 film’s premise as simple as its title is banal.The post-war setting is hinted at without ever becoming explicit, a device also used by Czech director Zbyněk Brynych’s in his... Read more... |
Juniper review - a classic role for Charlotte RamplingSaturday, 24 September 2022
Juniper provides, above all, an absolutely unforgettable role for Charlotte Rampling. New Zealander Matthew J Saville, who devised the script and directed the film, based her character, Ruth, on his own feisty and well-travelled grandmother, who had... Read more... |
Don’t Worry Darling review - dystopian thriller dries up in the desertFriday, 23 September 2022
Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her exceptional directorial debut Booksmart has been highly anticipated and, of late, accompanied by a torrent of behind-the-scenes bad press and viral virulence. It would be nice to report that the thriller itself... Read more... |
Sidney review - documentary portrait of Hollywood's first black superstarFriday, 23 September 2022
When Sidney Poitier died in January at the age of 94, the obituaries were warm and respectful to the pioneering black movie star. Now comes Oprah Winfrey’s nearly two-hour tribute, complete with famous interviewees, some great movie clips, and... Read more... |
