Film Reviews
Call Me By Your Name review - a star is born in a heartbreaking gay romanceFriday, 27 October 2017
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. Read more...
|
October, LSO, Strobel, Barbican review - Eisenstein with steel scoreFriday, 27 October 2017
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. Read more... |
Breathe review - heroic but airbrushed struggle against disabilityThursday, 26 October 2017
It’s a challenge to review this film without resorting to adjectives like “plucky” and “well-meaning”, and its mainstream comfiness made it a strangely cautious choice for the opening night of the recent London Film Festival. Breathe is not... Read more... |
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami review - a slow study of pop’s enigmaWednesday, 25 October 2017
Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. Read more... |
The Death of Stalin review - dictatorship as high farceFriday, 20 October 2017
Like Steptoe and Son with ideological denouncements, Stalin’s Politburo have known each other too long. Read more... |
Dina review - a poignant treatTuesday, 17 October 2017
Director Dan Sickles has known Dina her entire life. He knows her engaging personality, and he knows her tragic past. It’s the former which he and co-director Antonio Santini feel is worth celebrating in this Sundance award-winning documentary. Dina is a 48-year-old widow who views the world... Read more... |
LFF 2017: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool / Professor Marston and the Wonder Women reviews - stellar turns by Annette Bening and Rebecca HallSaturday, 14 October 2017
Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was far from Nicole Kidman’s finest hour. Read more... |
LFF 2017: Mindhunter / My Generation - Fincher comes to Netflix, Caine does Swinging LondonFriday, 13 October 2017
They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. Read more... |
Loving Vincent review - Van Gogh biopic of sorts lacks language to match its visualsFriday, 13 October 2017
Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board. Read more... |
The Snowman review - Michael Fassbender can't save Harry HoleThursday, 12 October 2017
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in bookshops with their fat spines in flashing yellow upper case, but until now he's been kept from the screen. Read more... |
LFF 2017: Blade of the Immortal / Redoubtable - Samurai slasher versus the Nouvelle VagueThursday, 12 October 2017
This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran Samurai haunted by the cruel murder of his sister Machi, but saved from death himself by the “bloodworms” which were fed to him by a mysterious veiled crone and have rendered him immortal. Read more... |
LFF 2017: The Shape of Water review – outsider s.f. and inter-species sex from del ToroWednesday, 11 October 2017
Fish out of water come in various guises in Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fable, shown at London Film Festival. Read more... |
LFF 2017: Last Flag Flying review - anti-war film without a biteTuesday, 10 October 2017
Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to one of the great American films of the Seventies, shown at London Film Festival, stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as old Vietnam buddies reunited as America is embroiled in another futile war... Read more... |
LFF 2017: Good Time review - heist movie with standout performance by Robert PattinsonMonday, 09 October 2017
This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time, shown at London Film Festival, a wild ride. An unrecognisable Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery... Read more... |
LFF 2017: Journey's End review - classic play becomes cracking filmSaturday, 07 October 2017
There have been several film and TV versions of RC Sherriff’s World War One play since it debuted on the London stage in 1928, but Saul Dibb’s new incarnation, shown at London Film Festival, is testament to the lingering potency of the piece. Read more... |
On the Road review - engrossing music documentary with a sly B-sideFriday, 06 October 2017
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends. 24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this...
Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not...
Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality...
In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV...
Pygmalion, Early Opera Company, Curnyn, Middle Temple Hall r...
With French baroque opera all but banished from the UK’s major...
Album: Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film
Stereolab always walked a knife edge between deadly serious and dead silly. Their sound was constructed around the sort of reference points –...
The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hande...
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....
Josefowicz, LSO, Mälkki, Barbican review - two old favourite...
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two...
Mr Swallow: Show Pony, Richmond Theatre review - magic trick...
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative...
The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of...
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on...
Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the dram...
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions...