Film
My New York Year review - lacklustre portrait of an ingenueSaturday, 22 May 2021
This pallid chick flick limps out on release having changed its title since its Berlinale 2020 debut; in the US it's known as My Salinger Year, but perhaps market research in Blighty decreed that name-checking the author of The Catcher in... Read more... |
Those Who Wish Me Dead review - Angelina Jolie battles baddies and blazes in MontanaFriday, 21 May 2021
With a track record which includes both Sicario movies, Hell or High Water and Wind River, Taylor Sheridan packs some muscle in the action-thriller department, though Those Who Wish Me Dead can’t match those previous highlights. Nonetheless, it’s... Read more... |
Nomadland review - on the road in the American WestFriday, 21 May 2021
Fern (a luminous Frances McDormand) used to work in HR. Now, aged 62, she’s harvesting sugarbeets, hauling rocks, cleaning toilets in a trailer park and doing shifts in an Amazon warehouse. And she’s living out of her camper van, a shabby, lovingly... Read more... |
Rare Beasts review - Billie Piper as triple threatThursday, 20 May 2021
Emotions don't come in half-measures in Rare Beasts, with which Billie Piper makes a commendably edgy debut as writer-director onscreen while affording herself a stonking star part. Dedicated., we're informed, to "all my friends and all their woes... Read more... |
Army of the Dead review - triumphant return to zombieland by director Zack SnyderWednesday, 19 May 2021
Zack Snyder’s CV includes such fantastic fare as Watchmen, 300, Man of Steel and his career-launching zombie-fest Dawn of the Dead, so who better to helm a zombies-in-Vegas heist movie? Army of the Dead has suffered an interminable gestation,... Read more... |
The Human Voice review - an intense half-hour that pulls no punchesWednesday, 19 May 2021
I wonder how many relationships have foundered during lockdown and how many have suffered the humiliation of being dumped over the phone or via social media? Filmed during the pandemic, Pedro Almodovar’s intense, half-hour short ... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Radio OnTuesday, 18 May 2021
Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film. Though its protagonist, Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for the United Biscuits Network, drives from London to Bristol in his two-... Read more... |
Ferry review - the making of a Dutch gangsterMonday, 17 May 2021
Success for the Belgian-Dutch crime series Undercover has led Netflix to produce an origin story for the show’s drug lord character Ferry Bouman (Frank Lammers). While this may be a dream come true for a portion of the show’s diehard fans, this... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Spy Who Came in from the ColdSunday, 16 May 2021
Martin Ritt’s 1965 classy screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an antidote to the full-colour hi-jinx of the Bond franchise that ruled over the spy movie genre in the 1960s. By the time Paul Dehn, an... Read more... |
The Woman in the Window review - hitching a ride with HitchSaturday, 15 May 2021
Darkest Hour may have been director Joe Wright’s finest hour, but we can say for certain that, despite its impressive cast, The Woman in the Window isn’t. Concocted from A J Finn’s titular novel with a screenplay by Tracy Letts, it’s a perplexingly... Read more... |
End of Sentence review - an American father and his estranged son reconcile in IrelandSaturday, 15 May 2021
It’s not until the final moments of End of Sentence that Frank (John Hawkes) lets himself laugh – he’s swimming in the icy waters of an Irish lake - and what a relief it is to hear. Icelandic director Elfar Adalsteins’s debut feature (Sailcloth, a... Read more... |
Some Kind of Heaven review - a Florida retirement community yields its secretsThursday, 13 May 2021
In the UK, we usually get a peek inside The Villages in Florida every four years, when intrepid reporters take to their golf carts in the retirement community to test the water in presidential elections among its 132,000 residents. Their views... Read more... |
