Film
Happening review - searingly intimate, furious abortion dramaSaturday, 23 April 2022
France is a female dystopia in Audrey Diwan’s immersive illegal abortion drama, set in 1963 and based on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel.Anamaria Vartolomei is Anne, the first girl from her rural family to go to college, where she is a modest... Read more... |
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent review - a very funny meta-comedyFriday, 22 April 2022
At a well-attended London press screening of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, there were, as might be expected, knowing chortles from Nicolas Cage-oscenti when specific films from his canon were either inserted or referenced – there were at... Read more... |
Ennio review - sprawling biog of the maestro of movie musicThursday, 21 April 2022
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in... Read more... |
The Wall of Shadows review - a holy Himalayan mountain and a Sherpa family's dilemmaThursday, 21 April 2022
“You’re mad to try and climb a holy mountain,” says Jomdoe, wife of Sherpa Ngada, as they argue over whether it’s more important to respect the body of God, aka the mountain Kumbhakarna in eastern Nepal, or to take the money earned from a dangerous... Read more... |
Playground review - bleak but brilliant schoolyard dramaThursday, 21 April 2022
Nora is seven, and it's her first day at school. Big brother Abel, already enrolled in their local primary, promises to find her at playtime. Prised away from her father's embrace, tearful Nora is set up from the opening moments of Playground... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The 400 BlowsTuesday, 19 April 2022
Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in... Read more... |
Operation Mincemeat review - Colin Firth and co practise the fine art of deceptionFriday, 15 April 2022
The story of the fictitious Major William Martin, whose waterlogged corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 bearing bogus documents designed to fool the Germans, was previously filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was. That version took a few... Read more... |
The Lost City review - terrific odd-couple comedyFriday, 15 April 2022
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss... Read more... |
The Northman review - Robert Eggers's elemental Viking epicFriday, 15 April 2022
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white... Read more... |
Benedetta review - lesbian nuns' sex and faith collideFriday, 15 April 2022
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a... Read more... |
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle review - three decades of hell in the PacificWednesday, 13 April 2022
Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably... Read more... |
Murina review - her father, her jailerWednesday, 13 April 2022
Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his... Read more... |
