REVIEW: The Zone of Interest [London Film Festival 2023]

With The Zone of Interest, his first film since 2013’s Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer has created another masterpiece, a monstrously mundane meditation on the banality of evil.

Based on the novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the Höss family, Rudolph (Christian Friedel), Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children.…

REVIEW: Foe [London Film Festival 2023]

There is perhaps no genre as primed for grand explorations of the human condition as science fiction.

Not constrained by the limits of the world as it is, it’s free to pose questions and imagine scenarios by which we might better understand ourselves.…

REVIEW: Maestro [London Film Festival 2023]

Maestro is a film obsessed with virtuosity.

Given the rapturous reception of his directorial debut, 2018’s A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper, who also stars, co-writes, and produces, has stacked the deck somewhat with his biopic of esteemed American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein.…

REVIEW: Killers of the Flower Moon [London Film Festival 2023]

Now into his ninth decade and perhaps the most beloved filmmaker still working today, Martin Scorsese certainly isn’t resting on his laurels.

With Killers of the Flower Moon, he returns to the historical epic with a grand and dismal account of a murderous conspiracy to acquire Native American land rights.…

REVIEW: May December [London Film Festival 2023]

The latest film from director Todd Haynes, May December is a misleadingly sunny exploration of uncomfortable truths.

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is a popular actor who has travelled to Savannah, Georgia, to spend some time with Gracie (Julianne Moore), who she is due to play in an upcoming TV movie.…

REVIEW: The Killer (2023) [London Film Festival 2023]

Three years on from the roaring historical drama of Mank, David Fincher returns with The Killer, a chilly, methodical thriller very much rooted in the present.

The Killer (Michael Fassbender, coolly compelling) is a professional.

His working life is meticulous, based on a routine designed to help him perform with maximum efficiency.…

REVIEW: The Bikeriders [London Film Festival 2023]

Everyone looks cool in leathers.

This would seem to be the main ethos behind Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders.

Based loosely on Danny Lyon’s photo-book of the same name, compiled from 1963-’67, the film follows the Vandals, a fictionalized Midwest motorcycle club composed mostly, in this telling, of movie stars and characters actors.…

REVIEW: Saltburn [London Film Festival 2023]

Having thoroughly skewered the male-female power dynamic in Promising Young Woman, in Saltburn Emerald Fennell turns her withering eye on another social structure: the British class system.

Newly arrived at Oxford University, scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), bright, studious, and dressed like Harry Potter newly arrived at Hogwarts – all house scarf and specs – struggles to fit in amid the bright young things.…

REVIEW: Rise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance

The sixth film in the long-running Essex hardman franchise, Rise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance is entertaining, convoluted, and… strangely progressive?

Returning as Pat Tate, a fictionalised version of a real-life wrong’ un, Craig Fairbrass gives us a slightly cuddlier, more sympathetic version of the character than the coked-up psychopath of some previous installments.…