REVIEW: The Lost Daughter (London Film Festival 2021)

The Lost Daughter is an honest and assured psychological study of what it means to be, or not to be, a parent.

Leda (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged literary professor on a solitary summer holiday in Italy. Her contentment, lying on the beach, marking her papers, is disrupted by the arrival of a large, brash American family, who lay their claim to the beach.…

REVIEW: Jackie reveals what we will do to put a mask on ambition & grief

Blackness. Orchestral strings rise up magisterially but sink almost immediately into discord; the wooziest of dying falls.

A beautiful woman, resplendent in pink, with jet-black bouffant hair, porcelain hair, and cheekbones to shame Bette Davis, coolly applies her makeup in an airplane mirror.…

Experimenter is a smart film about a smart guy

 

Writer-director Michael Almereyda enter public consciousness back in 2000 with his moody, ultramodern take on Hamlet — which featured Ethan Hawke as a suitably disaffected crown prince, complete with woolly Peruvian hat.

If something there got lost amidst the static and the skyscrapers, then his latest film, Experimenter — about social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), particularly his famed experiment into obedience to authority — is certainly more to the point.…

Black Mass is the parable of Johnny Depp and the Good Acting Choice

 

Everybody loves a good gangster film.

Whether you prefer the shadowy family drama of The Godfather or the stunning expose of Goodfellas, the criminal lifestyle lends itself to a myriad of different portrayals. In the case of Black Mass, it’s the codependent relationship between the Irish-American Mob in South Boston AKA Southie and the FBI.…

Night Moves is dead in the water

 

On first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d seen Night Moves before.

A tale of ambitious eco-terrorists directed by a well-respected, if relatively little-known indie director, featuring an emotionally guarded lead, a maturing young actress, and a Scandinavian-sounding “leader”.…