Film
Strange Darling review - love really hurtsFriday, 20 September 2024
“Are you a serial killer?” asks a woman sitting in a pick up truck with a man she just met at a bar. The neon sign from the motel they are parked outside bathes the couple in cool, blue light. “Do you have any idea of the risks a woman like me takes... Read more... |
The Goldman Case review - blistering French political dramaFriday, 20 September 2024
It’s a bold move to give a UK cinema release to this fierce courtroom drama about a French left-wing intellectual who was assassinated in1979. Pierre Goldman isn’t exactly a well-known figure on this side of the Channel, but perhaps the distributors... Read more... |
My Favourite Cake review - woman, love, and freedomMonday, 16 September 2024
The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.In... Read more... |
The Critic review - beware the acid-tipped penSaturday, 14 September 2024
The setting is the lively 1930s London theatre world, but any sense that The Critic will be a lighthearted thriller should soon be dispelled by a soundtrack featuring “Midnight and the Stars and You,” the song that Stanley Kubrick used to ominous... Read more... |
Lee review - shaky biopic of an iconic photographerFriday, 13 September 2024
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make... Read more... |
Reawakening review - a prodigal daughter returns, or does she?Friday, 13 September 2024
“I’d know her. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Would I know her? Would I?” John (a brilliant Jared Harris, who’s also an executive producer) is always looking for his daughter, who ran away from home ten years ago at the age of 14 and hasn’t... Read more... |
Red Rooms review - the darkest of websTuesday, 10 September 2024
A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes... Read more... |
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrectionTuesday, 10 September 2024
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Floating CloudsTuesday, 10 September 2024
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the... Read more... |
Starve Acre review - unearthing the unearthly in a fine folk horror filmMonday, 09 September 2024
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since... Read more... |
The Third Man rides again - 75th anniversary of Carol Reed's noir classicFriday, 06 September 2024
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic... Read more... |
Firebrand review - surviving Henry VIIIFriday, 06 September 2024
Life in Tudor times is a gift that keeps giving to film and TV people, even if the history has to be bent a little for things to make sense to contemporary audiences – Elizabeth (1998) and A Man for All Seasons (1966) being two of the more... Read more... |
