REVIEW: After Love [LFF 2020]

What do you do when the person you love isn’t whom you thought?

Mary Hussain (Joanna Scanlan) is a devoted wife and practising Muslim. She and Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia) have been together since their teens. They live in Dover, where Ahmed works as a ferry captain.…

REVIEW: Another Round (Druk) [LFF 2020]

© StudioCanal

Writer-director Thomas Vinterberg reteams with The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for Another Round, a boozy reflection on middle-aged boredom and ennui.

Martin (Mikkelsen) is not a fulfilled man.

History teacher at an elite high-school, he is perhaps best described, in the cautious words of one student, as “diffident”.…

REVIEW: One Night in Miami [LFF 2020]

Miami. February 25th, 1964.

22-year-old Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston in the Boxing World Heavyweight Championship and is crowned champion. That night, he retires to the Hampton House to celebrate with a few friends – NFL player Jim Brown, soul singer Sam Cooke, and civil-rights activist Malcolm X.…

REVIEW: Wildfire [LFF 2020]

Wildfire is a film that warns about the impact of unresolved violence.

After years of living hand-to-mouth, under-the-radar, Kelly (the late Nika McGuigan) is going home. Home for Kelly means a small town on the Irish border. The Troubles may have ended, but the wounds have never fully healed – at all, it seems, for Kelly.…

REVIEW: Shirley [LFF 2020]


After 2018’s disassociative coming-of-age story Madeline’s Madeline, Josephine Decker returns with another twist on a conventional narrative – the biopic as psychological thriller.

We first see our subject in soft focus, extreme close-up: bare skin, tangled hair, the hint of a face.…

REVIEW: Mangrove [LFF 2020]

In what has become something of an LFF tradition, Steve McQueen’s latest gets the festival off to a strong, socially-aware start.

It’s 1968 and things are changing in west London. Kids play beneath a towering overpass under construction and in Notting Hill a new restaurant, the Mangrove, provides a hub for the West Indian community.…

REVIEW: Say Your Prayers

British indie comedy Say Your Prayers locates itself comfortably in the tradition of inept Brits making a mess of rural idylls – in this case, violently.

The idyll here is the rugged landscape of West Yorkshire. The blokes in question are Tim (Harry Melling), permanently ensconced in a Tibetan earflap, and Vic (Tom Brooke), hatchet-faced and angry.…

REVIEW: The Devil All The Time & Enola Holmes [Netflix]

The Devil All The Time and Enola Holmes are perfect examples of high-quality, immediately disposable Netflix Originals.

Both have promising “indie” directors (Antonio Campos’ last feature was 2016’s Rebecca; Harry Bradbeer broke out directing Fleabag), at least a couple of stars (Devil’s ensemble includes the current Spider-Man and future Batman; Enola Holmes lead is Stranger Things’ Eleven with Superman himself in support as older brother Sherlock), and maybe some literary pedigree (both are based on best-selling novels.)…

REVIEW: i’m thinking of ending things

For a filmmaker whose first script, Being John Malkovich, plunged us, literally, into the head of a revered character actor and whose most recent, Anomalisa, was a stop-motion meditation on individuality, a couple’s car journey to visit the boyfriend’s parents might seem a bit… prosaic?…