REVIEW: Ammonite (LFF 2020)
Moving away from the green Yorkshire pastures of God’s Own Country where two young farmers fell in love, Francis Lee takes us back in time and to the seaside in his second film Ammonite – a quiet, intimate tale of a 19th-century lesbian romance. In…
REVIEW: Soul (LFF 2020)
What is your life’s purpose? It’s a frighteningly loaded question, one that’s tiring to even think about, let alone answer. But in Soul, Pixar maestro Pete Docter tackles it head-on in what is undoubtedly his most existential, inspiring and life-affirming film to date. Joe Gardner…
REVIEW: Six Stand-Out Shorts (LFF 2020)
LFF may have been done things a bit differently this year thanks to the pandemic, but the quality of the festival’s output is as strong as ever, and the short film programme is no exception to that. Out of the 37 short films (excluding Pedro…
REVIEW: I Am Samuel (LFF 2020)
There’s something quite beautiful about a documentary that doesn’t focus on a public figure or somebody deemed ‘extraordinary’, but instead follows a regular guy as filmed by one of his closest friends. In his moving documentary I Am Samuel, Kenyan writer/director Peter Murimi captures moments…
REVIEW: The Devil All the Time (2020)
Unless you’re already a fan of the book (in which case, bully for you for being ahead of the game!), then the biggest selling point of Antonio Campos’ The Devil All The Time is likely to be its cast. After all, who could resist the…
REVIEW: The Old Guard (2020)
Releasing a superhero film these days must be daunting. Just last year Marvel’s domination of the genre culminated in the record-breaking, $2.7 billion-grossing epic Avengers: Endgame, meanwhile the DCEU has recently hit it out the park with the likes of Shazam! and Birds of Prey….
REVIEW: Beyond the Mountain (We Are One 2020)
We Are One – A Global Film Festival Winner of the Best Feature award at last year’s Lleida Latin American Film Festival, Beyond the Mountain is a slow-burn Mexican dramatic thriller about a boy who goes looking for his estranged father following his mother’s sudden…
REVIEW: Six Stand-Out Shorts (We Are One 2020)
We Are One – A Global Film Festival The We Are One festival, which took place online from May 29 to June 7 2020, was organised by YouTube to raise funds for COVID-19 relief efforts around the world. Multiple international film festivals – such as…
REVIEW: Dolittle (2020)
Just as everybody is recovering from the bizarre CGI human-feline hybrids seen in Cats, another talking-animal film is unleashed on the world. Stephen Gaghan’s Dolittle doesn’t mix its species together, but unfortunately, it is far from a palate cleanser. Dolittle begins like a fairy-tale. Opening…
REVIEW: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2020)
If you’re under the age of 30, then Terry Gilliam has been trying to make and release The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for longer than you’ve been alive. He began developing the story in 1989, and finally started shooting the film in 2000, but…
REVIEW: Charlie’s Angels (2019)
Following the recent trend of rebooting or continuing classic franchises with women-led casts, such as in Ghostbusters (2016) and Ocean’s 8 (2018), Charlie’s Angels is the latest series to undergo a makeover. Unlike the others, it has always been led by women. But with a…
REVIEW: Vivarium (London Film Festival 2019)
From the moment that Vivarium’s opening bright red credits flash onto the screen à la Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, you know you’re in for a wild, unpredictable ride. When young couple Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) arrive at an estate agency looking to…
REVIEW: The Report (London Film Festival 2019)
In December 2014, 525 pages of a 6,725-page report on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of torture on terror suspects were released. The rest of the original, unredacted report remains classified, but Scott Z. Burns’ political docudrama The Report sheds light on the investigation, spearheaded by…
