Film Reviews
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat review - jazz-themed documentary on the 1960s Congo CrisisSunday, 17 November 2024
The British writer and Africa specialist Michela Wrong recently wrote a whistle-stop summary of the upheavals that afflicted Congo in the early 1960s: Read more... |
Gladiator II review - can lightning strike twice?Sunday, 17 November 2024
It has been nearly 25 years since Russell Crowe enjoyed his Oscar-winning finest hour as Maximus in Ridley Scott’s thunderous epic, Gladiator, and now Sir Ridley has brought us the next generation. Stepping up to the plate is Paul Mescal as Lucius (now known as Hanno), who finds himself an enslaved gladiator in Rome after an Imperial fleet has conquered his homeland of Numidia (Algeria, more or less). Read more... |
ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetimeSaturday, 16 November 2024
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars. Read more... |
Joy review - the birth pangs of in vitro fertilisationSaturday, 16 November 2024
Marie Curie excepted, movies about female scientists remain scarce, not just because STEM careers and Nobel Prizes still favour men. Now comes the British-made Joy, which explores women’s contributions to a decades-long quest to cure infertility. Read more... |
Bird review - travails of an unseen English tweenSunday, 10 November 2024
There’s a jolt or a surprise in almost every shot in Andrea Arnold’s Bird – her most impacted and energised depiction of underclass life yet. Photographed by Robbie Ryan, it’s a visual tour de force, one of the most exhilarating British films of 2024, but the affecting story it tells is undermined by its fleeting embrace of magical realism and the climactic swoop of a deus ex machina. Read more... |
The Problem With People review - local zeroFriday, 08 November 2024
A quarter of an hour into The Problem With People, there’s a 15-second clip of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – and it’s the best thing about this spectacularly unfunny comedy co-written by its American star, Paul Reiser (Mad About You, The Kominsky Method, Stranger Things). Read more... |
Anora review - life lesson for a kick-ass sex workerSaturday, 02 November 2024
Anora has had so much hype since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May that it doesn’t really need another reviewer weighing in. Sean Baker has crafted a high-velocity drama in three acts with a star-making turn by its lead Mikey Madison in the title role. She prefers to be called Ani and makes her living in a lap-dancing club in Manhattan by night before sleeping away her days in a run-down house in Brooklyn, right next to the rattle of the elevated train. Read more... |
Blitz review - racism persists as bombs batter LondonFriday, 01 November 2024
Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war. Read more... |
Small Things Like These review - less is more in stirring Irish dramaFriday, 01 November 2024
There’s much to note and commend about Small Things Like These, a sensitive, gorgeously shot and moving adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novel, about one man’s stand against the evils of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries. Read more... |
The Room Next Door review - Almodóvar out of his comfort zoneTuesday, 29 October 2024
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar made a run of screwball comedies, starting with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and ending with All About My Mother (1999), that were full of life, language and the aberrant behaviour of strong female characters. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and UkraineSaturday, 26 October 2024
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - a shaman and shamSaturday, 26 October 2024
Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects are out on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. Read more... |
Venom: The Last Dance review - Tom Hardy's people-eater bows outSaturday, 26 October 2024
The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock. Read more... |
London Film Festival 2024 - Angelina Jolie does Maria CallasThursday, 24 October 2024
Maria Read more... |
Emilia Perez review - Audiard's beguiling musical tribute to Mexico's womenThursday, 24 October 2024
A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar. Read more... |
Dahomey review - return of the kingWednesday, 23 October 2024
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries. Read more... |
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