Film Reviews
Everything Everywhere All at Once review - brace yourselfFriday, 13 May 2022
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those films that are guaranteed to make an audience feel their age. Unless you’re steeped in the multiverse genre (The Matrix films, the Marvel canon, etc.) and are comfortable with absurdist pop culture memes, it may well leave you reeling. Read more... |
The Quiet Girl review - finding a home away from homeThursday, 12 May 2022
The Quiet Girl is adapted faithfully from Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story, Foster, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and then expanded into a novella. Read more... |
This Much I Know to Be True review - Nick Cave’s redemption songsWednesday, 11 May 2022
Nick Cave’s cinematic progress has been unexpectedly, catastrophically personal. 20,000 Days On Earth (2014) introduced Bad Seed Warren Ellis as his droll, wild-bearded foil, with scripted, semi-fictitious revelations. Read more... |
Eleven Days in May review – children pay the price of warSunday, 08 May 2022
In another flare-up of Pyrrhic Hamas missiles and punitive Israeli bombing one year ago, over 60 Gazan children were killed. Michael Winterbottom and his Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf made Eleven Days in May as a “simple memorial to the children who lost their lives”. Sawwaf interviewed surviving relatives, who detailed those lives and erased futures. The result is an understated, unanswerable anti-war film. Read more... |
Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness – not strange, not madFriday, 06 May 2022
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a dream, then it isn’t, and so is/isn’t pretty much everything that follows. Read more... |
Wild Men review - Danish-Norwegian black comedyFriday, 06 May 2022
There are films that, after seeing the trailer, I very much expect to love. But when the actual movie is disappointing, I find writing the review makes me just a little bit sad. Unfortunately, Wild Men is one of those movies. Billed as a comedy-thriller, it doesn’t quite make the grade on either front, it's not gripping enough as a policier and the jokes often fall flat. Read more... |
Barry & Joan review - quirky documentary about two vaudevilliansFriday, 06 May 2022
If the state of the world is a little too bleak for you right now, do yourself a favour and watch this utterly charming documentary about Barry and Joan Grantham, a couple who have been married and performing together for several decades (Audrey Rumsby's film is vague on the details, but archive clips of them performing date back to the late 1940s). Read more... |
Downton Abbey: A New Era review - will we ever see its like again?Friday, 29 April 2022
A dozen years have passed since Downton Abbey first landed on our TV screens, since when it has passed into folklore. Whether you thought it was escapist historical froth, a ludicrous anachronism full of class-system clichés or a documentary probing the British aristocracy, Downton has lodged itself in the national consciousness, probably forever. Read more... |
The Tale of King Crab review - an unholy fool's phantasmagoric progressSaturday, 23 April 2022
“Crazy? Aristocrat? Sad? Killer? Drunk?” A modern Tuscan hunting lodge’s regulars remember the myth of irascible rebel Luciano many ways, as it endures from the previous century’s misty turn. Italian-American co-directors Matteo Zoppi and Allessio Rigo de Righi’s feature debut follows documentary shorts drawn from those real hunters’ yarns, tipped now into the phantasmagoric territory of Werner Herzog, or Lucretia Martel’s Spanish colonial fever dream, Zama. Read more... |
Happening review - searingly intimate, furious abortion dramaSaturday, 23 April 2022
France is a female dystopia in Audrey Diwan’s immersive illegal abortion drama, set in 1963 and based on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel. Read more... |
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent review - a very funny meta-comedyFriday, 22 April 2022
At a well-attended London press screening of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, there were, as might be expected, knowing chortles from Nicolas Cage-oscenti when specific films from his canon were either inserted or referenced – there were at least 18 of them listed in the closing credits from the hundred or so he has made in total. Read more... |
Ennio review - sprawling biog of the maestro of movie musicThursday, 21 April 2022
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in July 2020. Read more... |
The Wall of Shadows review - a holy Himalayan mountain and a Sherpa family's dilemmaThursday, 21 April 2022
“You’re mad to try and climb a holy mountain,” says Jomdoe, wife of Sherpa Ngada, as they argue over whether it’s more important to respect the body of God, aka the mountain Kumbhakarna in eastern Nepal, or to take the money earned from a dangerous climbing expedition that could help pay for their son’s education. Read more... |
Playground review - bleak but brilliant schoolyard dramaThursday, 21 April 2022
Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground as a sensitive child. Read more... |
Operation Mincemeat review - Colin Firth and co practise the fine art of deceptionFriday, 15 April 2022
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. Read more... |
The Lost City review - terrific odd-couple comedyFriday, 15 April 2022
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. 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...
A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, ITV1 review - powerful d...
The story of Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955 has found its own macabre niche in British folklore, and has been been the subject of several film,...
Album: Spiritbox - Tsunami Sea
Within the loud realm of metal, it often exists happily unbothered by the mainstream. And although a metal band going mainstream isn't always well...
Towards Zero, BBC One review - more entertaining parlour gam...
The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many...
Album: The Burning Hell - Ghost Palace
Cultural references run up the flagpole on Ghost Palace include Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” buskers covering Lynryd Skynyrd and Ed...
Mansfield Park, Guildhall School review - fun when frothy, c...
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also...
Chuck Prophet, Mid Sussex Music Hall, Hassocks review - the...
Forty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk...
Echoes: Stone Circles, Community and Heritage, Stonehenge Vi...
Stonehenge is about 5,000 years old; three photographic artists currently exhibiting in the visitor centre are all under the age of...
Album: Anoushka Shankar - Chapter III: We Return to Light
Chapter III: We Return to Light is an unashamedly gentle and soothing escape from a hectic world. The last in a travelogue ...