Film
Bruised review - Halle Berry takes the blows and does it her wayThursday, 18 November 2021
A classic specimen of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” school, Bruised is Halle Berry’s directorial debut. It was back in 2002 that Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and Bruised suggests that, at 55, she may have found... Read more... |
Blu-ray: One of Our Aircraft Is MissingTuesday, 16 November 2021
The fourth feature made by writer-director partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is not as celebrated as the six consecutive masterworks with which they followed it. It’s nonetheless a remarkably atmospheric... Read more... |
Mothering Sunday review - Odessa Young shines in adaptation of Graham Swift's novellaFriday, 12 November 2021
30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Sweet ThingTuesday, 09 November 2021
The independent filmmaker Alexandre Rockwell has flown under the radar since he made his name with the Cassavetes-vibed 1992 New York comedy In the Soup. He recently explained that his career was sabotaged by Harvey Weinstein, who was jealous,... Read more... |
Spencer review – daring, strange and deeply movingThursday, 04 November 2021
We ought to be sated with the Royal Family right now – on screen, given the riches of The Crown, and in general, what with the persistent, annoying buzz emitted by Harry and Meghan, or the odour of Andrew. So, it’s testimony to the enduring... Read more... |
Blu-ray: CeliaTuesday, 02 November 2021
Ann Turner’s 1989 feature debut Celia is one of the great coming-of-age films, an enthralling tale of pre-pubescent angst set against a backdrop of post-war Australian social and political history.Contemporary distributors did not know how to... Read more... |
Last Night in Soho review - hung overThursday, 28 October 2021
Take a bitter-sweet homage to Swinging Sixties London, then add a psychological horror story, and a murder mystery, with a dash of Mean Girls and a commentary on misogyny and sexual violence, all told through the prism of a young woman’s... Read more... |
Quant review - Sadie Frost's debut documentary skirts the genius of Mary QuantWednesday, 27 October 2021
As a teenager in 1967, I asked for a Mary Quant make-up box for Christmas and my parents reluctantly complied. It was so thrilling to hold that plastic white box with the black daisy in the middle and the big mirror in the lid and to be able, at... Read more... |
Blu-ray: I Never CryTuesday, 26 October 2021
In Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry, newcomer Zofia Stafiej excels as sullen Polish schoolgirl Ora, who resentfully travels to Dublin to collect the body of her estranged father, Krzysztof, who has been killed on the unsafe waterfront site where he’d... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The DamnedSunday, 24 October 2021
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La... Read more... |
Dune review - awesome display of sci-fi world-buildingWednesday, 20 October 2021
I’d venture that Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic is an almost perfect adaptation. It’s difficult to imagine the novel being better visualised, or its characters better cast; at the same time, the director’s own... Read more... |
Blu-ray: La Dolce VitaTuesday, 19 October 2021
One of those films weighed down by a considerable reputation, La Dolce Vita (1960) is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. From the very first sequence in which a figure of Christ sails across Rome’s skies, suspended from a helicopter, a... Read more... |
