REVIEW: Belfast (LFF 2021)
A triumphant personal return to form for Kenneth Branagh. Kenneth Branagh has been an acclaimed stage and screen actor for over three decades but his directorial efforts have been much more hit and miss. However, he has remarkably directed 21 films and while the early…
REVIEW: The Souvenir – Part II (2021)
[This review contains fairly detailed discussion of all parts of the film – avoid if you don’t want to be ‘spoiled’] Director Joanna Hogg’s highly personal tale of a young film student’s first serious relationship – 2019’s The Souvenir – was one of the best…
REVIEW: Spencer (Venice 2021)
Kristen Stewart packs a powerhouse performance in Spencer – Pablo Larrain’s extravagant tale based on the life of Diana Princess of Wales. But if you thought Spencer was little more than a character study of the People’s Princess, think again. Instead, Larrain has made something…
REVIEW: Ted Bundy – American Boogeyman (2021)
Ted Bundy was a prolific serial killer convicted of killing more than 30 women in the 1970s. With the real number of victims upwards of 100, Bundy’s reign of terror gripped America right up until his death by electric chair in 1989. Three decades later,…
REVIEW: Tove (2021)
Tove often feels less like a biopic about Tove Jansson’s career and more like a study of the Finnish art world in the 1940s. Eeva Putro’s screenplay is largely concerned with the conflict between the comforts of traditional family values and commercial art and the…
REVIEW: The United States vs Billie Holiday (2021)
The true power of music is its ability to carry a voice and a message beyond the limitations of its time and into the future. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is one such vital example of the kind of lingering and potent stories living on within…
REVIEW: Mank (2020)
Anyone who loves cinema, or who knows somebody who loves cinema, will be all too familiar with Orson Welles classic film Citizen Kane. What is hard to believe in our days of superhero franchises and directors who have to prove themselves for years, is that…
REVIEW: The Twentieth Century (2020)
Oscilloscope Pictures have been responsible for distributing three of the best, most unusual and distinctive films of the year – We Are Little Zombies, Saint Frances and now, The Twentieth Century. To even begin to describe The Twentieth Century is going to feel like my…
REVIEW: Stardust (2020)
Stardust has big predecessors that make it impossible for there not to be some sort of immediate comparison. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019) came out in the last two years and made history, making it difficult to identify which movie someone was talking about…
REVIEW: Small Axe – Mangrove (LFF 2020)
A number of the films that’ve snuck through the bars of the cinematic prison that is 2020 are films that chastise many of the institutional issues that have suffocated the most vulnerable for decades. Recently we saw a damning indictment of the American justice system…
REVIEW: Small Axe – Red, White and Blue (NYFF 2020)
Red, White and Blue is the second true story from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series to play the festival circuit and in some ways, is a counterpoint to the first – Mangrove. While Mangrove is a story of the police’s harassment campaign against a Caribbean restaurant…
REVIEW: One Night in Miami (TIFF 2020)
History is concretely objective and clear: it is defined by what happened, when, where, and how. Yet, there’s something about that latter portion, the how, that doesn’t feel so cemented. Yes, we can point to events that lie on the timeline leading to revolutions, and…
REVIEW: Tesla (2020)
Tesla is sort of like the curse of the monkey’s paw. You say that you want someone to finally make a totally unconventional biopic, and then one finger on the monkey’s paw curls. A common criticism of biopics is that they often come across as…
