Film
Lingui: The Sacred Bonds review - female love finds a wayMonday, 07 February 2022
“Lingui” is the Chadian word for “sacred bonds, the common thread”, a social ideal put to the test here by an illegal abortion. Director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – Chad’s artistic conscience, best-known for A Screaming Man – focuses for the first time... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection Vol 1Sunday, 06 February 2022
A man sits at a table in an otherwise bare room. Shot in monochrome and positioned off-centre, he reads a newspaper and smokes a cigar, lazily obscured as two other figures drift into and out of shot. A brief fight ensues. A man falls to the floor... Read more... |
Parallel Mothers review - letting the dead speakFriday, 04 February 2022
Almodóvar has rarely returned to the petrified Spain of his youth, flinging off Franco’s oppression by ignoring it in his early films of freewheeling provocation, where anarchic, hot freedom was all of the law. In this sober tale of secrets and lies... Read more... |
The Eyes of Tammy Faye review - Jessica Chastain pulls out all the stopsFriday, 04 February 2022
US televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker’s rise and spectacular fall from grace in the Seventies and Eighties has already been covered in a documentary film of the same name, released in 2000 with a voice-over by RuPaul.Why, you may ask, another... Read more... |
10 Questions for filmmaker Romola GaraiWednesday, 02 February 2022
The prolific actor Romola Garai first demonstrated her ability as a filmmaker with Scrubber, a gripping 20-minute feminist drama about a young middle-class mum and homemaker (Amanda Hale) who escapes her deadly routine through bouts of anonymous... Read more... |
Belfast review - coming of age amid the terror of the TroublesTuesday, 01 February 2022
For all his achievements as actor and director, Kenneth Branagh isn’t immediately thought of as a screenwriter, despite his multiple Shakespeare adaptations. That may all change with Belfast, because Branagh’s deeply personal account (he’s both... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Down by LawTuesday, 01 February 2022
Does restoration and upgrading to 4K always make a film better? I used to think so but after watching an unnervingly image-perfect Blu-ray of Down by Law, I’m not so sure.Jim Jarmusch's shaggy dog tale about three strangers thrown together in a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: ChampionTuesday, 25 January 2022
Champion (1949), one of many boxing films of the 1930s and 1940s, made a sculpture – and a star – of Kirk Douglas. In one of the few non-fight scenes, Douglas, as middleweight Midge Kelly, agrees to pose for an artist (Lola Albright), but quickly... Read more... |
Long Promised Road review - another attempt to probe the fragile genius of Brian WilsonSaturday, 22 January 2022
There has been no shortage of documentaries about king Beach Boy Brian Wilson, not to mention the 2014 bio-drama Love & Mercy, so the purpose of this new effort by director Brent Wilson (no relation) isn’t altogether clear. Certainly Wilson (the... Read more... |
Nightmare Alley review - a dazzling trip through a heart of darknessFriday, 21 January 2022
Director Guillermo del Toro has described Nightmare Alley as “a straight, really dark story”, lacking the supernatural elements in his previous films such as Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. Nonetheless, Nightmare Alley still feels like a... Read more... |
Memory Box review - exquisitely made drama set in LebanonFriday, 21 January 2022
Memory Box is that rare thing, a glimpse into a lost world from its traumatised inhabitants. Made by the Lebanese artist-filmmakers, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (a husband and wife team), it’s an intergenerational drama split between Beirut... Read more... |
Munich: The Edge of War review - Jeremy Irons excels in a revisionist portrait of Neville ChamberlainTuesday, 18 January 2022
The name of Neville Chamberlain and the term “appeasement” have become indelibly linked, thanks to his efforts to accommodate Adolf Hitler’s bellicose ambitions in the run-up to what became World War Two.This film version of Robert Harris’s novel... Read more... |
