Reviews
1923 is the year when Buster Keaton’s run of classic feature-length comedies gets out of the blocks with Our Hospitality, which signals its intention to be different even in its opening credits, which linger on the screen far longer than those of most films of the era. Here, they say, is something to be savoured. … Read more
Relic is a horror film that’s abnormally effective because it’s about something that’s going to happen to us all – old age (if we’re lucky) and death. As it opens Grandma Edna (Robyn Nevin) has gone missing. And so her daughter, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) have turned up at her house to … Read more
In the Earth is Ben Wheatley’s most overtly horror of horror films since he did the U is for Unearthed section of the portmanteau The ABCs of Death, though in films like Sightseers, High Rise and last year’s Rebecca horror has always lurked at the edges of his work. Made during the covid pandemic, and … Read more
Stories from the Chestnut Woods could so easily have been a misery memoir or poverty porn but thankfully it’s not. Instead director/writer Gregor Bozic has crafted an elegiac film of real beauty and poignancy. It’s set on the border where old Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) meets Italy, a region that’s been in decline for a long … Read more
Ne Zha, to rhyme with Treasure, is a landmark piece of Chinese animation, the first from that country in IMAX, made by debut feature director Jiaozi in his own studio, using voice talent that no one had ever heard of. There is more back story to Jiaozi – a nickname, real name is Yang Yu … Read more
There are two interesting things going on in Scare Me, which looks at first glance (and probably deliberately) like a Stephen King-style horror story about a writer having a tough time of it out in a cabin in the woods. Director/writer Josh Ruben also plays struggling writer Fred, here to crank out a horror tale … Read more
With Ridley Scott’s Napoleon thundering over the horizon on horseback, time to haul out a movie Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix have clearly feasted on, 1927’s historic and historical behemoth, Napoleon, aka Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (ie “as seen by Abel Gance”). Adored by Coppola, derided by Kubrick, who thought it “really terrible” … Read more
Sorry, Baby is the sort of film that’s hard to write about. Which is irritating if writing about it is exactly what you want to do. But not giving the whole game away probably makes for a more rewarding viewing experience for anyone intending to watch it. Without letting the cat entirely out of the … Read more
Raven Jackson used to be a poet and is still a photographer. You can see traces of both in her feature debut, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (a line from a poem), a deeply meditative celebration of rural black life on the Mississippi. The film starts with long, slow, close-ups of a girl and … Read more
These days, we’re used to a documentarian being an integral part of their own documentary. But Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 got there decades before the likes of Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore. Here, Kazuo Hara turns his camera on himself and his relationships and charts everything he sees. As an idea of what … Read more
Enid Blyton has been so unfashionable for so long that it must be time for a revival. The Magic Faraway Tree could be the start of it. An old-fashioned imaginative kids adventure, it’s full of the sort of wholesome derring-do that turned Blyton into the most translated children’s author ever. The presence of Andrew Garfield, … Read more
A James Bond who takes his orders not from M but from Him? The Man from Rome is an action thriller with an ecclesiastical twist set in photogenic Italy and Spain. Interesting, even if, by the end things have bogged down so badly that there’s the distinct impression of presentee-ism. Things are still happening on … Read more