Film Reviews
Luzzu review - a Maltese fisherman struggles with modernityFriday, 27 May 2022
In Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature, it’s a case of follow the swordfish. This terrifically atmospheric, almost documentary-like film – Camilleri cites Italian neo-realism, including Visconti’s La Terra Trema, as an influence – tells the story of Jesmark, a real-life Maltese fisherman (Jesmark Scicluna). It also encapsulates a dying culture. Read more... |
The Deathless Woman review - the overlooked persecution of the Roma peopleSaturday, 21 May 2022
One of the more heartwarming images in the news recently has been seeing Ukrainian refugees being welcomed by their eastern European neighbours. But there’s been very few mentions of how centuries-old European hostility to the Roma people, gypsies, and Travellers, has prevailed. These Ukrainians with an equally urgent need for refuge from violent Russian invaders have been met all too often with closed doors and closed borders. Read more... |
Benediction review - the world's worst woundsSaturday, 21 May 2022
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a haunting but uneven biopic of the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and a drama about the burden of incalculable loss. Read more... |
Top Gun: Maverick review - Tom Cruise defies age and gravityFriday, 20 May 2022
Only 36 years later, Tom Cruise is back with his eagerly-awaited Top Gun sequel (it was delayed a couple of years by Covid), and there are loyal legions of fans out there desperate to see it. The original, some say, in some way helped to “define” the 1980s, grossing $360m and spinning off a monster multi-platinum soundtrack album, headlined by Berlin’s cheesy synthetic megaballad “Take My Breath Away”.... Read more... |
I Get Knocked Down, Brighton Festival review - Chumbawamba singer's film is lively, funny and thought-provokingThursday, 19 May 2022
One effect of the film I Get Knocked Down, a playfully constructed journey around the life of Chumbawamba vocalist Dunstan Bruce, is to remind that socio-political rage was once woven into the fabric of popular music. Read more... |
The Innocents review - they're just playingThursday, 19 May 2022
The Innocents made a splash at Cannes in 2021 and it’s easy to see why. The Norwegian supernatural thriller, deftly written and directed by Eskil Vogt (who co-wrote The Worst Person In the World), explores the murky time in childhood when moral boundaries are still being drawn. Read more... |
Vortex review – an old couple's road to nowhereTuesday, 17 May 2022
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose joint decline is a protracted saga of alienation, confusion, and fear. Read more... |
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... |
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