film reviews
Joseph Walsh

Zeina Durras sophomore feature arrives on our screens a decade on from her debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! It was worth the wait. Luxor is a subtle, low-key drama that possesses an atmosphere of meditative calm, exploring a life that has seen too much pain and is desperate to find a way to heal. 

Graham Fuller

The bleak power of the Australian horror movie Relic, Natalie Erika James’s feature debut, derives from its masterful use of a simple metaphor.

Joseph Walsh

 A long shadow looms over Robert Zemeckisnew take on Roald Dahls classic 1980s book The Witches, starring Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway and newcomer Jahzir Bruno. That shadow is cast by Nicholas Roegs strange and terrifying 1990 adaptation starring Anjelica Huston, which expertly captured the wicked humour of Dahls book.  

Owen Richards

When Mogul Mowgli was first announced, it was fair to expect something of a realist biopic. After all, you had documentary director Bassam Tariq and actor/musician extraordinaire Riz Ahmed helming a film about a British-Pakistani rapper. Even the title is partially taken from one of Ahmed’s songs (“Half Moghul Half Mowgli” by Swet Shop Boys).

Saskia Baron

Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious.

Owen Richards

With Netflix releasing Rebecca on Wednesday, who’d have thought that a kid’s film would be this week’s best adaptation about an estate haunted by the memory of the deceased lady of the manor?

Graham Fuller

When it was announced that Ben Wheatley would be directing a new version of Rebecca, his fans must have wondered what kind of exciting damage he would do to the neo-Gothic template of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel – and how he might spin the material in a different way than did Alfred Hitchcock in his unimpeachable 1940 classic starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson.

Sarah Kent

“Black people, since the beginning of time, have always made things cool. Jazz, rock ’n’ roll… pick anything from a cultural standpoint and we have always been the arbitrators of cool,” says sports journalist Jamele Hill. “And it was really no different with sneakers.”

Tom Birchenough

Intriguingly, Summer of 85 could have been François Ozon’s very first film.

Joseph Walsh

There's something deeply uncanny about Adrian Shergold's Cordelia. When the film's poster was released on social media, many mistook it for a kinky period drama with the power dynamics reversed. It definitely isn't a costume drama, but there's some kink.