Category: Review
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The Red Turtle Review – Agonising perfection
Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle is just sickeningly beautiful. Seriously. It’s like every frame is draped with so much perfection that it becomes impossible to glimpse the working parts underneath. It’s so striking, so mercurial that you really can’t deny the power of the thing.
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The Other Side of Hope Review: Something being said
Damn, why is it that all the Nordic movies are the most determinedly stylish? If it ain’t Juho Kuosmanen buying up Europe’s entire stock of 16mm b/w film for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki or Roy Andersson playing with the nature and texture of digital filmmaking in his Living Trilogy then…
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King Arthur: Legend of the Sword – Nah mate
The American reviews for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword came out last week. I try to aviod such things but the negative buzz was pretty overwhelming. ‘It can’t be that bad,’ I thought, ‘it’s a Guy Ritchie film. I like Guy Ritchie films.’
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The Levelling: Farm Life
The Levelling was shot on location in Somerset, which comes with the opportunity for me to swell up with pride. There ain’t too many films that explore our part of the world. Usually we’re just shipped to other places to ham up our accents and play the British equivalent of the yokel.
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Frantz: Love after the war
There’s something about wartime romance movies. Usually in this country it’s the Second World War. After some searching i found the last most recent one, the insipid 2004 joint Suite Française. A film, as they always are about the love affair between a French woman and this dashing Nazi officer. At least Ilsa, She Wolf…
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Miss Sloane: Anti-feminist empowerment
Let’s be frank here: at its best, Miss Sloane is a mid-tier, House of Cards level, sub-Sorkin-at-his-best tale of fictionalised (and mostly depoliticised) demi-ethical political manoeuvring and personal conduct.
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Alien: Covenant: A clumsy remix
Did you enjoy Alien? You know how Aliens took the approach of completely recontexualising the familiar iconography through the perspective of a different genre lens? What originally was a tension horror joint reinterpreted as military action, the very image of the xenomorph itself taking a completely different meaning through its multiplication. Difference of ten years…
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Mindhorn: These fair Isles
It’s weird seeing the title cards in independent movies that were never supposed to be on the big screen. At the opening of Mindhorn Isle of Man Film’s logo looks like a shitty jpeg, stretched out awkwardly to fill the screen. There’s been some talk, a surprising amount of films shoot on the Isle but…
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Harmonium: A perfect lil film
Harmonium is a film of two halves. The first, a slow burn tension flick: a family’s life is disturbed by the emergence of a figure from the husband’s past. Who is this mysterious dude? Why is he now living in their house? Is he plotting something; he certainly seems shifty. Then at the moment of…
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Sleepless: The double double
The posters for Sleepless ask us not to ‘judge a cop by his cover.’ Can we judge him for the fact that he seems to be a total asshole instead?
A Grand Quiet 