Film
In Front of Your Face review - a day in the lifeWednesday, 28 September 2022
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Love (Szerelem)Tuesday, 27 September 2022
Károly Makk’s Love (Szerelem) is full of silences and absences, this 1971 film’s premise as simple as its title is banal.The post-war setting is hinted at without ever becoming explicit, a device also used by Czech director Zbyněk Brynych’s in his... Read more... |
Juniper review - a classic role for Charlotte RamplingSaturday, 24 September 2022
Juniper provides, above all, an absolutely unforgettable role for Charlotte Rampling. New Zealander Matthew J Saville, who devised the script and directed the film, based her character, Ruth, on his own feisty and well-travelled grandmother, who had... Read more... |
Don’t Worry Darling review - dystopian thriller dries up in the desertFriday, 23 September 2022
Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her exceptional directorial debut Booksmart has been highly anticipated and, of late, accompanied by a torrent of behind-the-scenes bad press and viral virulence. It would be nice to report that the thriller itself... Read more... |
Sidney review - documentary portrait of Hollywood's first black superstarFriday, 23 September 2022
When Sidney Poitier died in January at the age of 94, the obituaries were warm and respectful to the pioneering black movie star. Now comes Oprah Winfrey’s nearly two-hour tribute, complete with famous interviewees, some great movie clips, and... Read more... |
Silent Land review - an inconvenient death mars their holidayFriday, 23 September 2022
How people dance always gives them away. Alone on the floor of a Sardinian coastal nitespot in Silent Land, the bourgeois Polish couple Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieska Żulewska) fling themselves around as dementedly as if red... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Kuhle WampeTuesday, 20 September 2022
Kuhle Wampe is a fascinating curio, a blend of documentary, social realist drama and political debate which so bothered the German authorities upon its release in 1932 that they promptly banned it. The censorship board’s justification condemned the... Read more... |
Bloody Oranges review - a gruesome and gruelling French social satireMonday, 19 September 2022
Oh no. Not that orange knife and male genitals thing again. In 1976, Marco Ferreri set La Dernière Femme in Créteil in the outskirts of Paris – I was working in a school there, so the memory does tend to stick – and set out to shock audiences by... Read more... |
Funny Pages review - comic-book confidentialSaturday, 17 September 2022
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist.From this... Read more... |
Moonage Daydream review - sensory bombardment and secretsSaturday, 17 September 2022
Watching Bowie for the only time in what turned out to be his last tour in 2003, I wanted glamour and mystique, Ziggy preserved. Instead here was ordinary bloke Dave, badly dressed in faded jeans and a mismatched top. The beautifully sung, committed... Read more... |
Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)Thursday, 15 September 2022
Paris, 16 March 1960 – and cinema ruptured. The first public screening of the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, A Bout de Souffle, breathed life into an arthritic medium, announcing a new world of possibility.Its story, of a French petty... Read more... |
Crimes of the Future review - Cronenberg looks backWednesday, 14 September 2022
Crimes of the Future is a nostalgic return to classic Cronenberg, a comforting catalogue of body horror and fleshy biosynthesis, paranoid plots and shadowy cabals. Sharing a title with his 1970 debut, the director is still fascinated by our physical... Read more... |
