Over the last few years, there have been a series of British film releases each January which achieve minor prospects in the awards season and which can be labelled as “shortbread tin cinema”, on account of their historical period aesthetic, lack of flashiness, and a sort of parochial attitude that only appeals to filmgoers over … Continue reading Review // Stan and Ollie
Illustration by Thomas Durham. The year began with The Shape of Water and ended with the cinematic debut of Aquaman while in-between was a veritable ocean of variously challenging, unconventional, intelligent and rousingly entertaining features – plus the floating turd of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The convergence of the global media landscape continued apace as … Continue reading Feature // Year in Review: 2018
On a drab tiled floor, a bucket of mop-water is sloshed down a drain; in a moment of unexpected repose, the puddle reflects a window on the world above as a plane glides overhead, visualising a dichotomy between a world of wealthy jetsetters and the more sedate world of the earthbound and the domestic. The … Continue reading Review // Roma
Eleven months since its Sundance Festival debut, the audaciously high-concept comedy Sorry To Bother You – written and directed by progressive rapper Boots Riley in his feature film debut – has finally arrived in the UK, capping off a banner year for black filmmakers after Jordan Peele’s Oscar win for Get Out, and the phenomenal … Continue reading Review // Sorry To Bother You
Jesus H. Christ. I mean… When Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first demonstration of moving images developed with their Cinematograph projection device at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris in 1895, who could have imagined it would take until 2018, over a century later, for the art-form of film to be perfected, when, … Continue reading Review // Mandy
A raw and unflinching deconstruction of the music industry machine and the undue pressures forced upon vulnerable and traumatised artists in shameless pursuit of commercial success and societal relevance, anchored by a gut-wrenching performance from Lady Gaga. But enough about the superior Netflix documentary, Gaga: Five Foot Two – the film actually being reviewed here … Continue reading Review // A Star Is Born
In 1993, two teenage girls sneak out of their high school prom to the parking lot where, under the dim glow of Friday night lights, they fumblingly caress each other in the backseat of a car. This precious expression of adolescent romance however is juxtaposed against a preceding shot pattern of closeups of nervous hair … Continue reading Review // The Miseducation of Cameron Post
In Matt Ross’ 2016 comedy-drama Captain Fantastic¸ Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) raises his six children in a familial commune, isolated deep inside the forests of Washington, wherein he is guided by the philosophical principles of Noam Chomsky to teach his brood to adhere to values of self-reliance, critical thinking and co-existence with nature. The film’s … Continue reading Review // Leave No Trace
A few months ago, I was watching the trailers before a screening and one of them was for the horror flick Truth or Dare (Jeff Wadlow, 2018), yet another retread of the hoary genre formula where a group of nubile teens are picked off one by one by sinister and supernatural forces, only this time … Continue reading Review // Hereditary
After his tenderly passionate debut Weekend and the strained marriage-in-crisis drama 45 Years - led by British New Wave icons Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling – Andrew Haigh continues his ascendancy into the upper tier of British screen talents with his third film and first transatlantic foray: an exploration of horse-rearing culture in the Pacific Northwest … Continue reading Review // Lean on Pete
Wrap Party 