Film Reviews
Let Him Go review - melancholy family drama morphs into ferocious thrillerThursday, 17 December 2020
The pairing of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman’s surrogate parents in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did not go unnoticed, and here writer/director Thomas Bezucha has reunited them as Montana residents George and Margaret Blackledge. Read more... |
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review - keeping things theatricalWednesday, 16 December 2020
There was always bound to be a hint of melancholy watching George Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Try as you might to focus on the film, you can never quite shake the fact that you’re watching the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, whose life was cut tragically short this year from bowel cancer. Read more... |
Wonder Woman 1984 review - be careful what you wish forWednesday, 16 December 2020
After months of watching movies on computer screens, how delightful to have a press screening at the Waterloo IMAX cinema, albeit under Covid restrictions. Not so delightful was the realisation that Wonder Woman 1984 is crying out for some editing shears (151 minutes! Read more... |
Blu-ray: The New WorldTuesday, 15 December 2020
Terrence Malick completists might consider this Blu-ray of The New World the dream version. Criterion's three-disc release contains the three different cuts of Malick's 2005 opus, which critics either believe is an incomparable masterpiece or an overly lavish work of self-indulgence. Read more... |
I'm Your Woman review - what's happening, indeed?Saturday, 12 December 2020
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close. Read more... |
Mosul, Netflix review - gruelling story of Iraq's Nineveh SWAT teamSaturday, 12 December 2020
It may seem incongruous that a factually-based film about Iraqis battling against murderous Islamic State invaders should have been produced by the Russo brothers, famous for Marvel’s Avengers and Captain America blockbusters. Read more... |
The Mole Agent review - leftfield and charming documentaryFriday, 11 December 2020
The Chilean director Maite Alberdi makes warm, witty, empathetic, fly-on-the-wall documentaries, whose subjects are always surprising. Read more... |
American Utopia review - the new age of the concert movieFriday, 11 December 2020
American Utopia is not your average Spike Lee joint. He has teamed up with David Byrne of Talking Heads to make a concert movie based on Byrne’s lauded Broadway show of the same name, which opened in October 2019 in a limited run. After the success, Byrne invited Lee to direct this screen version. Read more... |
The Midnight Sky review – flawed but moving apocalyptic sci-fiThursday, 10 December 2020
The last time George Clooney was in a space movie, Gravity, he and Sandra Bullock were marooned above Earth and desperate to get home. The Midnight Sky has the opposite dynamic: here Clooney is Earthbound, urgently trying to warn incomers to stay the hell away. As science-fiction premises go, it feels rather apt. Read more... |
The Prom review - merry Meryl in middling musicalWednesday, 09 December 2020
Four Broadway denizens resolve to change the world "one lesbian at a time" in the cheerful if often cheesy The Prom, the film adaptation of a recent Broadway musical that continually reminds you of at least a half-dozen similar... Read more... |
Host review - Zoom seance triggers unspeakable consequencesSaturday, 05 December 2020
Lockdowns must be good for something, right? Read more... |
Falling review - Viggo Mortensen's powerful directorial debutFriday, 04 December 2020
“California is for cocksuckers and flag-burners. Did they know you were a fag in the army?” Willis (Lance Henriksen; best known as Bishop in Alien) asks his son John (Viggo Mortensen), now living in LA with his husband Eric and their adopted daughter Monica. Read more... |
County Lines review - a scary descent into drug-dealer purgatoryThursday, 03 December 2020
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Read more... |
Mank review – David Fincher’s brilliant, bitter-sweet paean to Hollywood’s Golden AgeWednesday, 02 December 2020
For so much of the year, Tenet was cited as the film that was going to save cinema – the tentpole extravaganza that would draw virus-conscious punters back to the big screen. The assertion was always fanciful, the pandemic being too long a haul; with no disrespect to Christopher Nolan, the fanfare around his latest spoke more of industry desperation than reality. Read more... |
Collective review - waging war on corruptionWednesday, 02 December 2020
It was around the time of the 14th century Black Death that the word “corruption” – from the Latin corruptus, the past participle of corrumpere, “to mar, bribe, destroy” – was first associated with putrefaction. Read more... |
Uncle Frank review - well-acted but painfully contrivedSaturday, 28 November 2020
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Read more... |
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