Film Reviews
Remote review - an irredeemably silly first featureSaturday, 01 October 2022
Remote is Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film. The New York-based artist was commissioned by Artangel, an organisation renowned for its promotion of interesting projects. Support also comes from art institutions across the world – Beijing, Denmark, Korea, Louisiana, Montreal and Stockholm. Read more... |
Blonde review - Marilyn Monroe thrown to the wolvesFriday, 30 September 2022
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and washed down with Scotch in her Los Angeles bungalow. Read more... |
In Front of Your Face review - a day in the lifeWednesday, 28 September 2022
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career. Read more... |
Juniper review - a classic role for Charlotte RamplingSaturday, 24 September 2022
Juniper provides, above all, an absolutely unforgettable role for Charlotte Rampling. New Zealander Matthew J Saville, who devised the script and directed the film, based her character, Ruth, on his own feisty and well-travelled grandmother, who had led a full life, and then returned home – where she drank substantial quantities of gin every day. Read more... |
Don’t Worry Darling review - dystopian thriller dries up in the desertFriday, 23 September 2022
Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her exceptional directorial debut Booksmart has been highly anticipated and, of late, accompanied by a torrent of behind-the-scenes bad press and viral virulence. It would be nice to report that the thriller itself transcends all the noise; but, despite yet another exceptional performance by Florence Pugh, it’s a misfiring, undernourished, disappointing affair. Read more... |
Silent Land review - an inconvenient death mars their holidayFriday, 23 September 2022
How people dance always gives them away. Alone on the floor of a Sardinian coastal nitespot in Silent Land, the bourgeois Polish couple Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieska Żulewska) fling themselves around as dementedly as if red ants are swarming on their bodies. Read more... |
Bloody Oranges review - a gruesome and gruelling French social satireMonday, 19 September 2022
Oh no. Not that orange knife and male genitals thing again. In 1976, Marco Ferreri set La Dernière Femme in Créteil in the outskirts of Paris – I was working in a school there, so the memory does tend to stick – and set out to shock audiences by having the main character, played by a young Gérard Depardieu, cut off his life expectancy with the aid of a Moulinex electric kitchen knife. Read more... |
Funny Pages review - comic-book confidentialSaturday, 17 September 2022
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist. Read more... |
Crimes of the Future review - Cronenberg looks backWednesday, 14 September 2022
Crimes of the Future is a nostalgic return to classic Cronenberg, a comforting catalogue of body horror and fleshy biosynthesis, paranoid plots and shadowy cabals. Sharing a title with his 1970 debut, the director is still fascinated by our physical adaptation to future shocks. Read more... |
See How They Run review - a whodunit pastiche set in Fifties LondonFriday, 09 September 2022
A starry cast headed by Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell doesn’t quite manage to bring this lavish, light-hearted period pastiche to life, though it looks good – nice cars, lovely costumes, a quasi-Wes Anderson vibe – and there are mild chuckles to be had. Read more... |
Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD: The PianoTuesday, 06 September 2022
Jane Campion’s enigmatic, triple-Oscar-winning film looks as beautiful as it did when it was released almost 30 years ago. Holly Hunter (you can’t help thinking she’s been underused ever since, give or take her performance in Campion’s Top of the Lake) is magnificent as the black-haired Ada, a mysteriously mute Scot who is sold by her father to frontiersman Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) and joins him as his wife in the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand. Read more... |
Three Thousand Years of Longing review - be careful what you wish forSaturday, 03 September 2022
Before there was cinema, there was story-telling around the fire with those who could spin the best yarns, conjure the most vivid visions, winning the love of their audience. George Miller has been bringing innovative and entrancing stories to the screen ever since his debut with Mad Max in 1979, and has never limited himself to one genre. Read more... |
The Forgiven review - the shelterless skySaturday, 03 September 2022
John Michael McDonagh’s acerbic tragedy of manners and morals sees West meets East, in a literal car crash of sloppy behaviour and messy intentions. Read more... |
Meeting Gorbachev review - Werner Herzog offers a swansong tributeWednesday, 31 August 2022
You react differently to Meeting Gorbachev knowing that the film’s subject was on occasions brought to its interviews from hospital by ambulance; his interlocutor, Werner Herzog, doesn’t mention that fact, of course, anywhere in the three encounters on which this documentary is based, but he has alluded to it elsewhere. Read more... |
Her Way review - turning tricks for her son's sakeSaturday, 27 August 2022
Marie (Laure Calamy), the efficient fortysomething sex worker protagonist of the French drama Her Way, doesn’t have life easy, but she calmly works the badly paid street corners of Strasbourg because she can choose her clients, some of them long-term regulars, and dictate her hours. What Marie doesn’t need is having to find €9,000 euros in a few weeks. Read more... |
Queen of Glory review - carving an identity between two worldsFriday, 26 August 2022
Queen of Glory is a passion project, nurtured for almost 10 years as a script by Nana Mensah, who ended up not only directing the film but taking the lead role as well in order to get it made. Read more... |
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