Film
Blu-ray: The Count Yorga CollectionWednesday, 02 November 2022![]() In 1970, the coffin of America’s new vampire count travels to his lair in the hills of LA on a pickup truck. A giant billboard for John Wayne in True Grit observes his passage through Hollywood’s urban bustle, as this Gothic monster enters the then... Read more... |
Triangle of Sadness review - ship of foolsMonday, 31 October 2022![]() Ruben Östlund builds theatres of cruelty for the elite, petri dishes for pretension and hypocrisy. After Force Majeure’s family implosion at a ski resort and The Square’s art crowd Armageddon, Triangle of Sadness casts off with a superyacht which... Read more... |
Hilma review - biopic of the Swedish abstract artist Hilma af KlintFriday, 28 October 2022![]() The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Ballad of Tam-LinFriday, 28 October 2022![]() The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its... Read more... |
Vesper review - impressively art-directed sci-fi filmMonday, 24 October 2022Vesper is a piece of arty European sci-fi, filmed in the forests of Lithuania (homeland of co-director Kristina Buozyte) and set in a dystopian future conjured up by its French co-director Bruno Samper (a "digital experience designer"). The two... Read more... |
Decision to Leave review - sly, slow-burning love and deathSunday, 23 October 2022![]() In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.Brilliant young detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) becomes obsessed as... Read more... |
The Banshees of Inisherin review - stellar turns from Brendan Gleason and Colin FarrellFriday, 21 October 2022![]() Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2022 - the winners and the losersFriday, 21 October 2022![]() The London Film Festival ended with the announcement of assorted prizes, all well-deserved. My colleague Demetrios Matheou has already written here about the Chilean political thriller, 1976, which won Best First Feature, and we’ll be writing... Read more... |
Hopper: An American Love Story review - a dry view of a much richer subjectTuesday, 18 October 2022![]() This rather disappointing documentary about the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has such a dry parade of experts and such a slow linear narrative that it leaves plenty of time to be frustrated by all that’s been left out.Made by the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Ingmar Bergman Vol 3Tuesday, 18 October 2022![]() The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.Most of them are as dark as they come. The Scandi Noir that has... Read more... |
London Film Festival 2022 - women's voices powerfully to the foreMonday, 17 October 2022![]() Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of... Read more... |
Halloween Ends review - the final cutMonday, 17 October 2022![]() It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie... Read more... |
