Latest Reviews
The Woman with Leopard Shoes
Of all the films I’ve seen at the Raindance festival this year, The Woman with Leopard Shoes has been the best so far. It was put together under Covid-19 strictures and yet here it
The Man Who Knew Too Much
James Stewart? Doris Day? Alfred Hitchcock? No. Instead meet Colin Wallace, a retired real-life spook who got heavily involved in the UK government’s undercover operations in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, blew the whistle
Antarctica
Antarctica is a Booksmart-style comedy about a couple of high school girls, friends who don’t fit in, cocky and standoffish as a defence against the scorn they get from fellow schoolmates. They are not
Scare Me
There are two interesting things going on in Scare Me, what looks at first glance (and probably deliberately) like a Stephen King-style horror story about a writer having a tough time of it out
Come As You Are
In 2006 a Leeds-based American man called Asta Philpot visited a brothel while on holiday in Spain. He got laid. Nothing unusual there, except Asta was born with arthrogryposis, a condition that means he
Shirley
Shirley is your madwoman’s breakfast, a seething mass of dramatic tropes held together by a distinctly 1940s Freudian thriller atmosphere and populated by characters from a hall of mirrors. Elisabeth Moss plays real-life novelist
Back Roads
Having played the junior James Bond figure Alex Rider in Stormrider, and then a few teenage heartthrobs before bulking up to become a kind of Channing Tatum in waiting, Alex Pettyfer takes control of
Camp X Ray
One of three 2014 Kristen Stewart films that seemed designed to shift her image out of Twilight territory and into something with a bit more actorly grunt, Camp X Ray works better as brand
God’s Own Country
It was reading about his highly anticipated 2020 film Ammonite that jolted me into the realisation that I’d never got around to seeing God’s Own Country, former actor Francis Lee’s 2017 debut as writer/director.