Film
Blu-ray: The World of Wong Kar WaiSunday, 06 June 2021
There is an irony in the fact that the most celebrated of auteurs to emerge during Hong Kong’s "Second Wave" of directors in the 1980s did not originate from within the bounds of the administrative region. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai was the son... Read more... |
A Quiet Place Part II review - noise abatement sequelFriday, 04 June 2021
Fourteen months after the Manhattan premiere of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place Part II – and three years after his taut, spare original spawned the most suspenseful sci-fi horror franchise of recent times – the movie is setting post-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Fast Times at Ridgemont HighTuesday, 01 June 2021
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless)... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Jungle FeverSunday, 30 May 2021
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough... Read more... |
Surge review - jittery and joylessSaturday, 29 May 2021
Seventeen years after Ben Whishaw shot to attention playing Hamlet, this terrific actor is again playing someone "mad-north-northwest". Marking TV director Aneil Karia's feature film debut, Surge casts Whishaw as a jittery wreck called Joseph, whose... Read more... |
First Cow review - beautifully realised frontier dramaFriday, 28 May 2021
Kelly Reichardt is one of America’s most distinctive directors, whose meticulously detailed, character and place-driven dramas have a lowkey vibe that belies their impact. Not many directors could make a yarn about a couple of baking entrepreneurs... Read more... |
Frankie review - dying for nuanceThursday, 27 May 2021
American filmmaker Ira Sachs excels at crafting throughtful relationship dramas in which middle-class characters confronted with crises or unanticipated realisations gain valuable emotional knowledge. His best works – Forty Shades of Blue (2005),... Read more... |
Cruella review - fabulous fashions, creaky narrativeThursday, 27 May 2021
Is Cruella the escapist blockbuster the Covid-blighted world has been waiting for? Well, it’s a feast for the eyes but 20 minutes too long, and for an origin story of the despicable Cruella De Vil of The Hundred and One Dalmations fame, it lacks the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Masculin FémininTuesday, 25 May 2021
Jean-Luc Godard’s film-making career, a restless quest for a cinema that questions the medium as well as its place in the social and political context, is both astonishingly prolific and unique. Rarely drawing directly on autobiographical themes,... Read more... |
My New York Year review - lacklustre portrait of an ingenueSaturday, 22 May 2021
This pallid chick flick limps out on release having changed its title since its Berlinale 2020 debut; in the US it's known as My Salinger Year, but perhaps market research in Blighty decreed that name-checking the author of The Catcher in... Read more... |
Those Who Wish Me Dead review - Angelina Jolie battles baddies and blazes in MontanaFriday, 21 May 2021
With a track record which includes both Sicario movies, Hell or High Water and Wind River, Taylor Sheridan packs some muscle in the action-thriller department, though Those Who Wish Me Dead can’t match those previous highlights. Nonetheless, it’s... Read more... |
Nomadland review - on the road in the American WestFriday, 21 May 2021
Fern (a luminous Frances McDormand) used to work in HR. Now, aged 62, she’s harvesting sugarbeets, hauling rocks, cleaning toilets in a trailer park and doing shifts in an Amazon warehouse. And she’s living out of her camper van, a shabby, lovingly... Read more... |
