film directors
David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)Monday, 20 January 2025
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years... Read more... |
Maria review - Pablo Larraín's haunting portrait of an opera legendFriday, 10 January 2025
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it... Read more... |
A Real Pain review - Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin take a Holocaust tour of PolandWednesday, 08 January 2025
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from... Read more... |
Nickel Boys review - a soulful experimentSaturday, 04 January 2025
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves... Read more... |
Best of 2024: FilmThursday, 26 December 2024
Saskia BaronAnoraBetween the TemplesIo CapitanoDahomeyEmilia PerezGreen BorderIo CapitanoMonsterA Normal ManSoundtrack to a Coup d’EtatThe usual perverse list unfolds. Two beautifully made and thought-provoking films about emigration, an... Read more... |
The Commander review - the good ItalianTuesday, 10 December 2024
Patriotic Italian films set during the Fascist war effort are understandably rare UK releases. Submarine commander Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) was, though, an honourable warrior-poet who director Edoardo De Angelis seeks to separate from... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson on 'Rumours'Saturday, 07 December 2024
Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly... Read more... |
Nightbitch review - Mother's life as a dogFriday, 06 December 2024
Rachel Yoder says she wrote her debut novel Nightbitch as a reaction to Donald Trump’s first term as President, with what she saw as its consequent mood-shift in America towards “traditional values and women staying home, taking care of the kids.”It... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The OutcastsTuesday, 29 October 2024
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues... Read more... |
Venom: The Last Dance review - Tom Hardy's people-eater bows outSaturday, 26 October 2024
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria CallasThursday, 24 October 2024
MariaHow do you solve a problem like Maria? Pablo Larrain’s film picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who have broken the highbrow barrier to become truly... 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... |
- 1 of 33
- ››
