Film
Blu-ray: TargetsTuesday, 03 October 2023
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of... Read more... |
The Creator review - bold, beautiful, flawed sci-fi epicFriday, 29 September 2023
It has been seven years since Gareth Edwards directed, for me, the best of the new generation of Star Wars films, Rogue One. Having made Godzilla before that, it’s nice to see him return with a more personal project, a big, bold, beautiful... Read more... |
The Old Oak review - a searing ode to solidarityFriday, 29 September 2023
Ken Loach has occasionally invested his realist TV dramas and movies with moments of magical realism – football inspiring them in The Golden Vision (1968) and Looking for Eric (2009) – but magical spaces in them are rare. In The Old Oak,... Read more... |
Surprised by Oxford review - wishy-washy romance ticks the sightseeing boxesWednesday, 27 September 2023
The misty streets and lofty spires of Oxford star in this adaptation of Carolyn Weber’s 2011 memoir, Surprised by Oxford, in which she finds God while studying for an MPhil in English literature.Perhaps wisely, director and co-writer Ryan Whitaker... Read more... |
Strange Way of Life review - Pedro Almodóvar's queer WesternTuesday, 26 September 2023
Less is more, except when it isn’t. Among the latest batch of overlong Oscar-tipped movies by celebrated auteurs such as Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer with a running time of 181 minutes) and Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon, 207 mins),... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Gregory's GirlTuesday, 26 September 2023
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the... Read more... |
The Nettle Dress review - a moving story exquisitely toldMonday, 25 September 2023
Lasting just over an hour, The Nettle Dress is like a fairy story. It builds very slowly, each beautifully framed shot contributing toward a perfect little gem that tells a moral tale.A man spends seven years coming to terms with the loss of both... Read more... |
Expend4bles review - last ride for the over-the-hill gang?Friday, 22 September 2023
Thanks to numerous arguments and disagreements over script, casting etc, nine years have elapsed since Expendables 3 hit the multiplexes, and Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew were perilously close to being over the hill even then. In... Read more... |
R.M.N. review - ethnic cleansing in rural RomaniaThursday, 21 September 2023
If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie... Read more... |
A Year in a Field review - exemplary eco-docThursday, 21 September 2023
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the... Read more... |
Side By Side Ukrainian Film Festival, Curzon Soho - cameras of courage and resistanceWednesday, 20 September 2023
François Truffaut said that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because cinema inevitably glorifies the horror of conflict. The premise was robustly challenged over the weekend at the Ukrainian Institute London’s fourth annual film festival,... Read more... |
A Haunting in Venice review - a case of Poirot by numbersMonday, 18 September 2023
You can imagine the thought processes that brought Kenneth Branagh’s latest adventure as Poirot, his third, to the big screen.“Memo to self: Find an Agatha Christie/Poirot story that hasn’t been done to death already, in fact isn’t well known at all... Read more... |
