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: Wife of a Spy (2021)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest directorial venture, Wife of a Spy, is a romantic period piece set in Japan during World War II. It is centered around Satoko Fukuhara (Yū Aoi), who begins to suspect that her husband Yūsaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi), might be a spy for…
REVIEW: The World to Come (2021)
As someone who is generally not a fan of Westerns, there have been a few films within the last decade that have been set in 19th century American isolated frontiers that have caught my eye and I’ve ended up loving – and these are the…
REVIEW: The Yellow Wallpaper (2021)
Gothic fiction has had something of a resurgence in the last decade, with adaptations of classic novels including Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011), Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (Roger Michell, 2017), Henry James’ The Turn…
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: 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: Minari (2020)
When I was around 4 years old, my dad relocated my family from the big city where I was born to a relatively smaller one. I didn’t know what was the reason back then, as I was just a little kid. But as I grew…
TV REVIEW: The Queen’s Gambit (2020)
Scott Frank, the Oscar-nominated writer of Out of Sight, Minority Report and Logan brings a new 7-part mini-series to Netflix – The Queen’s Gambit. It is based on the novel by Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler and…
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: Rebecca (2020)
While remakes and reboots are – perhaps deservedly so – controversial, literary adaptations are more complicated. The problem can come when there is one particular adaptation of a novel which is considered ‘classic’ or ‘definitive.’ That is very much the case with Daphne Du Maurier’s…
REVIEW: The Mortuary Collection (2020)
Combine twentieth century period aesthetics with a smattering of practical effects, soak it in Gothic atmosphere and apply a liberal sprinkling of body gore galore and you have the ingredients of pretty much the perfect horror film for this particular film critic. And like a…
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: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
As fate would have it, Academy Award winning screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, returned his long-gestating project, The Trial of the Chicago 7, in one of the most volatile periods in modern American history. In the wake of nationwide riots and protests surrounding ever-present issues like Black…
