Film Reviews
LFF 2018: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs review - Wild West tales, and Redford and JackmanWednesday, 17 October 2018
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. Read more... |
1945 review - Hungarian holocaust dramaFriday, 12 October 2018
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. Read more... |
LFF 2018: Colette review - zinging with zeitgeisty relevanceFriday, 12 October 2018
The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but gives each of its stars, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, one of the... Read more... |
First Man - Neil Armstrong's giant leapThursday, 11 October 2018
Echoes of Phil Kaufman’s 1983 classic The Right Stuff resonate through Damien Chazelle’s new account of how Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Read more... |
Tehran Taboo review - transgressive animationSaturday, 06 October 2018
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian... Read more... |
A Star is Born review - Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga make a compellingly combustible duoFriday, 05 October 2018
"It's the same old story, told over and over forever": So remarks the redoubtable Sam Elliott late in the most recent reboot of A Star is Born, which itself manages to take an oft-told story and reinvent it very much afresh. Read more... |
Kusama - Infinity review - amazing tale of survival against the oddsThursday, 04 October 2018
Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main picture) and ideas pour out faster than she can realise them, even though she works all day, six days a week. Read more... |
The Wife review - Glenn Close deserves better from her latest Oscar bidFriday, 28 September 2018
Writers need to write, or so goes the unimpeachable argument that underpins The Wife, which is being strongly touted as the film that may finally bring leading lady Glenn Close an Oscar in her seventh time at bat. Read more... |
Black 47 review - a gripping and unusual dramaThursday, 27 September 2018
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. Read more... |
Skate Kitchen review - sisterhood in the skate parkThursday, 27 September 2018
“Let’s get a clip, Long Island.” One New York skateboarder encourages another, who’s from the ‘burbs, to show off ollies, pop shuvits and kick-flips for a YouTube video. But hang on: “There are too many penises in the way.” This is a posse of young women, a rare sighting in the male world of the skate park. Read more... |
The Little Stranger review - the wrong sort of chillsSaturday, 22 September 2018
Domnhall Gleeson needs to watch it. In Goodbye Christopher Robin he played AA Milne, the creator of Pooh and co. To achieve the correct level of period English PTSD, it was as if he’d folded himself up into a neat pile of desiccated twigs. And now he’s gone and done it again in The Little Stranger, only more so. Read more... |
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. review - not your average popstarSaturday, 22 September 2018
Why is M.I.A. such a problematic pop star? Why can't she just shut up and release a hit? Tellingly, this is the very question the singer poses at the start of Matangi/Maya/M.I.A - a question she's been asked throughout her career, from interviewers to management. Read more... |
Faces Places review - Agnès Varda's enchanted journeyThursday, 20 September 2018
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly... Read more... |
Never Here review - conceptual art may damage your healthWednesday, 19 September 2018
Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. Read more... |
Wajib review - poignant, profound humanismSaturday, 15 September 2018
Annemarie Jacir’s third feature may have picked up a subtitle, “The Wedding Invitation”, for international distribution, but the key to her intimate portrait of Palestinian life seen through a... Read more... |
Lucky review - fabled character actor stars in his own obituaryFriday, 14 September 2018
Harry Dean Stanton died in September last year aged 91, and will forever be remembered as the embodiment of the lean, lonely, laconic stranger, a man of few words but imbued with an enigmatic allure. This film, the directorial debut of character actor John Carroll Lynch, has been conceived as both homage to and starring vehicle for the departed Stanton, but doesn’t quite hit the spot on either count. Read more... |
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