Film
To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustleFriday, 14 February 2025
The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through... Read more... |
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Bridget has started ditching the ditzThursday, 13 February 2025
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof on 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' - 'It became a question of self-respect'Wednesday, 12 February 2025
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013... Read more... |
Blu-ray: High and LowTuesday, 11 February 2025
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct... Read more... |
Bring Them Down review - ramming it home in the west of IrelandFriday, 07 February 2025
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden... Read more... |
September 5 review - gripping real-life thrillerThursday, 06 February 2025
There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.September 5 ... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Stray DogTuesday, 04 February 2025
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a... Read more... |
Hard Truths review - a bravura, hyperreal performance from Marianne Jean-BaptisteFriday, 31 January 2025
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible... Read more... |
Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV eventFriday, 31 January 2025
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the... Read more... |
By the Stream review - enigmatic Korean dramaThursday, 30 January 2025
“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was... Read more... |
Flight Risk review - the sky's the limit for Michelle Dockery and Mark WahlbergSaturday, 25 January 2025
Director Mel Gibson probably made Flight Risk with Netflix’s “90-minute movies” slot in mind (in fact he overshot – it lasts 91 minutes). It hits the spot of “escapist no-brainer action flick” by being lean, sharply-focused and amusingly... Read more... |
Presence review - Soderbergh's haunted cameraSaturday, 25 January 2025
The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled... Read more... |
