Film Reviews
Escape from Pretoria review - fun but facile prison-break dramaWednesday, 04 March 2020
Based on the book by former political prisoner Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria is an intermittently engaging jailbreak tale set in South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as further evidence of Daniel Radcliffe’s determination to run as far as possible in the opposite direction from his past life as Harry Potter. Its only problem is a troubling case of schizophrenia, since it’s not sure whether to be a pared-down thriller or a political statement. Read more...
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True History of the Kelly Gang review - anarchy in OzMonday, 02 March 2020
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Read more... |
Downhill review - American remake wanders off-pisteSaturday, 29 February 2020
It’s hard to believe that Jesse Armstrong (Succession, Veep) co-wrote the screenplay for this feeble American remake of Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2014). Read more... |
Portrait of a Lady on Fire review – love unshackledFriday, 28 February 2020
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is windblown, spare, taut, and sensual – a haunted seaside romantic drama, set in the 18th century, that makes most recent films and series dressed in period costumes seem like party-line effusions of empty style and social conservatism (Gentleman Jack excepted). Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: Never Rarely Sometimes Always review - raw and unflinching abortion drama hits homeFriday, 28 February 2020
Back in 2017, writer-director Eliza Hittman won over audiences with her beautiful coming-of-age drama Beach Rats. Read more... |
Dark Waters review - an ominous drama with plenty of backbone, but not enough fleshFriday, 28 February 2020
Watching Dark Waters, the latest film from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), I kept thinking — what’s the opposite of a love letter? The film is based on the work of Rob Bilott, a real-life lawyer who uncovered a corruption scandal so toxic that it was literally poisoning us. Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: Berlin Alexanderplatz review - a contemporary twist on a classicThursday, 27 February 2020
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Read more... |
Push review – lifting the lid on the housing crisisWednesday, 26 February 2020
Italian journalist Roberto Saviano still lives in fear of his life 11 years after writing Gomorrah, which explores how criminal gangs use tax havens to launder money. “You make 100 million euros from trafficking cocaine or migrants,” he explains, “and you buy restaurants, hotels and houses legally, sell them to your offshore company then buy them back at a much higher price.” Read more... |
Berlinale 2020: My Salinger Year review - 70th edition of the festival opens in styleMonday, 24 February 2020
There’s an undeniable romance to mid-Nineties New York. Absent of the chirp of mobile phones, or the swirl of social media, it comes across as a more halcyon age, closer to the Forties than the Noughties. Read more... |
Midnight Family review - a thrilling documentary set in Mexico CitySaturday, 22 February 2020
“It’s cool to see a car crash or a gunshot wound, it’s exciting.” Emergency medical technician Juan Ochoa, 17, loves his work, which is just as well because he doesn’t always get paid. Read more... |
Little Joe - trouble in the greenhouseFriday, 21 February 2020
Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner’s disquieting fifth feature, and her first English language one, Little Joe is a sci-fi drama that ponders the tangled choices faced by many modern women – Kubrickian though it is in its imma Read more... |
The Call of the Wild review - how big-hearted Buck became leader of the packFriday, 21 February 2020
Jack London’s original novel was a brutal and Darwinian account of a dog's life in the Klondike during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century. Read more... |
Greed review - so-so satire of the über richThursday, 20 February 2020
Steve Coogan’s long partnership with director Michael Winterbottom is probably best known for The Trip and its spin-offs, involving Coogan’s comic culinary excursions alongside Rob Brydon. Read more... |
First Love review - Miike delivers thrills and spillsSaturday, 15 February 2020
He's one of Japan's foremost directors, and if you’ve witnessed one of his films before, you know what to expect from a Takashi Miike yakuza film. High-octane, boundary pushing fun from first frame to last. And that’s exactly what First Love is. Read more... |
Sonic the Hedgehog review - stuck in first gearFriday, 14 February 2020
An early trailer for this adaptation of the ‘90s games franchise caused Cats-like horror at its overly humanoid Hedgehog. Read more... |
Emma review – lustrous but far from definitiveThursday, 13 February 2020
The decade is kicking off with the revisiting of old classics. That’s not a bad pursuit, with new audiences in mind, though these days there’s a reasonable expectation of a shot in the arm, a contemporary spin, a fresh perspective. Greta Gerwig certainly achieved that with Little Women, as did Armando Iannucci with The Personal History of David Copperfield. Read more... |
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