Film
Vortex review – an old couple's road to nowhereTuesday, 17 May 2022
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Henry: Portrait of a Serial KillerSunday, 15 May 2022
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the... Read more... |
Everything Everywhere All at Once review - brace yourselfFriday, 13 May 2022
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that are guaranteed to make an audience feel their age. Unless you’re steeped in the multiverse genre (The Matrix films, the Marvel canon, etc.) and are comfortable with... Read more... |
The Quiet Girl review - finding a home away from homeThursday, 12 May 2022
The Quiet Girl is adapted faithfully from Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story, Foster, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and then expanded into a novella.Much of the dialogue in Colm Bairéad’s beautiful, mainly Irish-language film... Read more... |
This Much I Know to Be True review - Nick Cave’s redemption songsWednesday, 11 May 2022
Nick Cave’s cinematic progress has been unexpectedly, catastrophically personal. 20,000 Days On Earth (2014) introduced Bad Seed Warren Ellis as his droll, wild-bearded foil, with scripted, semi-fictitious revelations. Andrew Dominik’s One More Time... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Round MidnightTuesday, 10 May 2022
Among the plentiful bonus items in this Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Round Midnight, the last one is a surprise. It shows Dexter Gordon in his prime, back in 1969.He’s doing the thing for which, purely as a jazz musician, he’s best known. We see... Read more... |
Eleven Days in May review – children pay the price of warSunday, 08 May 2022
In another flare-up of Pyrrhic Hamas missiles and punitive Israeli bombing one year ago, over 60 Gazan children were killed. Michael Winterbottom and his Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf made Eleven Days in May as a “simple memorial to the... Read more... |
Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness – not strange, not madFriday, 06 May 2022
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a... Read more... |
Wild Men review - Danish-Norwegian black comedyFriday, 06 May 2022
There are films that, after seeing the trailer, I very much expect to love. But when the actual movie is disappointing, I find writing the review makes me just a little bit sad. Unfortunately, Wild Men is one of those movies. Billed as a... Read more... |
Barry & Joan review - quirky documentary about two vaudevilliansFriday, 06 May 2022
If the state of the world is a little too bleak for you right now, do yourself a favour and watch this utterly charming documentary about Barry and Joan Grantham, a couple who have been married and performing together for several decades (Audrey... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Escape from LATuesday, 03 May 2022
Fifteen years after John Carpenter scored a massive box-office hit with his ingenious low-budget sci-fi thriller Escape from New York (1981), he was given a free rein to make Escape from LA. Unfortunately, unlimited access to extras... Read more... |
Downton Abbey: A New Era review - will we ever see its like again?Friday, 29 April 2022
A dozen years have passed since Downton Abbey first landed on our TV screens, since when it has passed into folklore. Whether you thought it was escapist historical froth, a ludicrous anachronism full of class-system clichés or a documentary probing... Read more... |
