Russell Crowe tries to leave an overcrowded party.
Formerly titled Bear Country, Derrick Borte’s The Get Out arrives with a premise that sounds deceptively simple: a nightclub owner decides he has had enough and decides to get out of the business.…
Category: Reviews
REVIEW: Blue Moon
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon opens on a note so unexpectedly forlorn that it reverberates through everything that follows.
A classic lounge number drifts over a rain-sheened alley. Into this slumps a diminutive man — hat slipping, thinning combover exposed, body folding like a cigarette collapsing in ash.…
REVIEW: Anemone
It’s not easy having a legend for a dad.
Though, to be cynical, it probably helps in getting a film made.
Anemone is Ronan Day-Lewis’s first film, co-written with his father Daniel Day-Lewis, who also stars — returning to the screen after eight years.…
REVIEW: Good Boy (2025)
The first image says it all: a russet-brown pooch drowsing on a couch, the warmth of his fur glowing bright against encroaching shadows.
It’s peaceful, almost banal. Then a phone rings, a jarring note in a chiaroscuro frame. Light flickers. Shadows thicken.…
REVIEW: The Last Sacrifice
England still likes to remember itself its B&W heyday: BBC newsreels narrated in perfect RP, thatched cottages, fields rolling merrily into eternity.
Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice starts inside that bucolic dream — and then slashes it open.
On Valentine’s Day, 1945, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire, elderly farm labourer Charles Walton was found murdered with his own tools; pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, his neck slashed by a billhook.…
REVIEW: Colossal Wreck
Colossal Wreck is not really a film about COP28 or even about climate change; or at least not just about them.
It is about the pathological difficulty of taking collective action in a society of hyper-individualization and self-obsession.
The camera begins in an ordinary London house on an ordinary London street.…
REVIEW: Frankenstein (LFF 2025)
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of exquisite surfaces.
Every frame glows with painterly attention: the flicker of candlelight on stitched flesh, a crimson-lacquered angel, a rider frozen mid-gallop in a snowbound tableau. It’s as if Del Toro has built an anatomical model of Frankenstein – every bone polished, every vein visible – but forgotten to breathe full life into it.…
REVIEW: Hamnet (LFF 2025)
We all know how it ends.
That’s the strange power of Hamnet – its inevitability.
The film, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapted by her and Maggie O’Farrell’s from O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, begins beneath the shadow of this foreknowledge: Shakespeare’s young son will die, and from that death will come the greatest tragedy in English literature.…
REVIEW: Wake Up Dead Man – A Knives Out Mystery (LFF 2025)
Its title sounds like a declaration of an in-built twist, but Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s latest addition to the Knives Out universe, has loftier ambitions in mind.
After the classic manor-house intrigue of the original Knives Out and the sunlit, self-refractive satire of its sequel, Glass Onion, we find ourselves in the isolated parish our Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in Chimney Rock, upstate New York.…
REVIEW: Mickey 17
Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s latest, is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but one that fails to come to life.
Our titular iterative protagonist, hapless sad-sack Mickey (Robert Pattinson; endearing, like a naïfish Looney Tune), discovers that intergalactic travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when he realises he’s signed up to be an Expendable.…