Film
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Leonie Benesch on playing an overburdened nurse in the Swiss drama 'Late Shift'Tuesday, 12 August 2025
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.Benesch's portrayal of a committed night nurse working in... Read more... |
Freakier Friday review - body-swapping gone ballisticTuesday, 12 August 2025
Before Freakier Friday there were the two film versions of Freaky Friday based on Mary Rodgers’s lively, perceptive 1972 Young Adult novel, the foremother of all body-swap movie comedies (including Big).In Rodgers’s story, a feuding mother and... Read more... |
Beating Hearts review - kiss kiss, slam slamThursday, 14 August 2025
Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance... Read more... |
Materialists review - a misfiring romcom or an undercooked satire?Wednesday, 13 August 2025
The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with... Read more... |
Eight Postcards from Utopia review - ads from the era when 1990s Romania embraced capitalismSunday, 10 August 2025
If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof... Read more... |
The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count risesSaturday, 09 August 2025
The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom. Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican... Read more... |
Weapons review - suffer the childrenSaturday, 09 August 2025
Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud on sex, love, and confusion in the modern worldWednesday, 06 August 2025
"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world.... Read more... |
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams review - love lessonsWednesday, 06 August 2025
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Two Way Stretch / Heavens Above!Tuesday, 05 August 2025
The years between 1955’s The Ladykillers and 1964’s Dr Strangelove were the years of what Sanjeev Bhaskar recently described as "peak Sellers", a period when the great comic actor rarely seemed to put a foot wrong. Two Way Stretch and Heavens Above... Read more... |
Late Shift review - life and death in an understaffed Swiss hospitalFriday, 01 August 2025
Floria (the superb Leonie Benesch: The Crown; The Teachers’ Lounge; September 5) is a nurse, working the severely understaffed night shift in a Zurich hospital. She is constantly doing three things at once, sanitising her hands, snapping her gloves... Read more... |
The Naked Gun review - farce, slapstick and crass stupidityFriday, 01 August 2025
The original Naked Gun series (spun off from the Police Squad! TV show) brought reliable belly-laughs to the Eighties and Nineties and starred the incomparable Leslie Nielsen as the preposterous detective Frank Drebin, but for this regenerated... Read more... |
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