fri 29/03/2024

Film Reviews

Typist Artist Pirate King review - shine on, Audrey Amiss

Graham Fuller

The stories told by writer-director Carol Morley are poignant reclamation projects that demonstrate empathy for lost or troubled souls but don’t flinch from difficult truths.

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20,000 Species of Bees review - a marvel of a debut

James Saynor

Are we all getting older, or are film award-winners getting younger? Sofía Otero won the Silver Bear for best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival this year at the age of just nine. To achieve that, it surely needs to be one of the best moppet turns of all time – and I think it quite possibly is.
 
She plays an eight-year-old boy who doesn’t answer to the name of Aitor even when he’s gone missing and dozens of searchers are yelling it out.

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The Killer review - David Fincher's latest cult movie?

Saskia Baron

Since its release in 1999 David Fincher’s Fight Club has become something of a cult movie with young men who recite lines from the script like mantras. "This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time". It seems likely his new film, The Killer, will inspire the same devotion with the same demographic.

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Cat Person review - the dynamics of dating and bad sex

Markie Robson-Scott

Margot (Emilia Jones; Coda) has made a terrible mistake. She’s landed up in bed with Robert (Nicholas Braun; cousin Greg in Succession) and realises the sex is going to be excruciatingly bad.

How to tell him that she’s changed her mind? Can she leave before it’s too late? Or is it easier to get it over with, otherwise he might turn nasty? 

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Our River... Our Sky review - another people's war

Hugh Barnes

The first casualty of war is not truth, as the saying goes, but humanity – and not just in the sense of collateral damage. Media reporting turns victims into news items, along with satellite images of wrecked buildings or tanks crawling through a desert.

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Killers of the Flower Moon review - the Osage tragedy

Graham Fuller

At the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, closely adapted from the 2017 non-fiction book by the investigative journalist David Grann, is the true story of how the white former doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprii) was inveigled into slowly poisoning his Native American wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) for her share of oil wealth in 1920s Oklahoma.

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Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed review - the closeted life of a Hollywood great

Adam Sweeting

Rock Hudson was built up as a silver screen archetype of heterosexual manhood, with his 6ft 5in frame and muscular physique, but his story has subsequently come to epitomise a Hollywood system built on illusions and delusions.

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Foe review - unsettling sci-fi drama

Demetrios Matheou

Garth Davis’s Foe is cast from that classic science fiction mould that uses a fantastical premise to explore the commonplace, yet profound aspects of our lives; in this case, the intricacies, dissatisfactions and anxieties of a marriage.

At the same time, it offers the sort of unsettling mystery and killer twists that have made the similarly inclined Black Mirror such a success.

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The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from the Life of John le Carré, Apple TV+ review - outstanding, intriguing portrait of David Cornwell

Helen Hawkins

When the Oscar-winning documentary-maker Errol Morris sat David Cornwell down before his Interrotron camera in 2019, the first salvo of the chat came, not from the interviewer, but from his subject: “Who are you?” 

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London Film Festival 2023 - mixed fortunes for film masters

Nick Hasted

The LFF's Best Film Award winner, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follow-up Evil Does Not Exist, is a characteristic mix of extended takes and conversations, limpid beauty and dizzyingly intense dramatic incident, and just one of the festival's major auteur UK premieres.

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London Film Festival 2023 - monsters, ghosts and diabolical people

Demetrios Matheou

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an intoxicating achievement, a ravishing, twisted, very funny and even radical fable that must be a major contender in the awards season that gets into gear as the London Film Festival closes. 

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London Film Festival 2023 - movies in a musical vein

Adam Sweeting

The Rolling Stones are winning plaudits for their Hackney Diamonds album, but Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is a brilliant and sometimes painfully emotional portrait of the woman who helped inspire some of their finest work in their golden years, including “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Pallenberg’s heroin habit prompted Marianne Faithfull to write “Sister Morphine”.

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Lies We Tell review - fear and gaslighting in 1860s Ireland

Sebastian Scotney

It is 1864 and the lush green lawns of Knowl, the stately home in Ireland that Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey) will inherit when she reaches the age of 21, are beautifully kept. Everything is in its place. Maud expects deference, especially from the domestic staff.

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The Miracle Club review - unchallenging but enjoyable Irish drama

Veronica Lee

If I had to condense the Catholic faith of my upbringing in one sentence, I would say that it essentially comes down to two things: we're all sinners, but we are all capable of redemption. (Theological experts may take a different view.) That boiled-down notion appears to be the takeaway of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club, set in 1967 working-class Ballygar, just outside Dublin – the kind of place whose residents live there their entire life.

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Dalíland review - a tidy portrait of a chaotic artist

James Saynor

The director Mary Harron is famous for staying classy while tackling blood-splashy topics – notably the attack on pop art’s leader in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and whatever the hell was going on in the Bret Easton Ellis novel that became Harron’s American Psycho (2000). Almost any male director would have gone Brian-De-Palma-berserk with the latter, but Harron’s film is more memorable for an OCD Christian Bale handing out his business cards than any ultra-violence.

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London Film Festival 2023 - a mixed bag of dramas and documentaries

Saskia Baron

The London Film Festival continues to pull in an eclectic selection of films from all over the world. And it’s from the countries not known for their movie industries that some of the most impressive and engaging films have emerged.

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