Reviews
Streaming channel Shudder picked up You’ll Never Find Me at the Tribeca Festival, proving yet again that whoever does the buying over there has an eye for a good horror movie. It’s an “it was a dark and stormy night” affair. A man sitting alone in his grungey trailer in the back of the Australian … Read more
The Day of the Jackal would probably appeal to the members of a Facebook group called the Dull Men’s Club – recent topics include fuel efficiency while driving, insulating old buildings and dealing with nail fungus. The Dull Men’s Club (a Dull Men’s and Women’s Club also exists) loves detail, procedure, process, how things work and … Read more
For her debut feature as a director, French actor Sandrine Kiberlain has decided not to take the easy route and instead go for something a bit bolder. Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien (A Radiant Girl) is a familiar story told in an unfamiliar way. Kiberlain returns to the grim history of the Jews of … Read more
28 Years and a Bit Years Later, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was never going to be called. It’s the 2026 sequel to 2025’s 28 Years Later, which came 18 years after 28 Weeks Later, and it started shooting as soon as Danny Boyle had handed over to his replacement and handed the … Read more
Here’s a different type of samurai movie, the winner of the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars, following the strange, grudging friendship that develops between two warriors – one fierce, the other mild. It’s a massive sprawling affair that starts in 1899 in a doctor’s office where an old man and his grandson are seeking help. … Read more
Bold and unusual and entirely itself it may be, but Illuminata isn’t entirely successful as a film. Strange as it may seem, maybe writer/director/producer/actor John Turturro wants it that way. This was only his second movie behind the camera and, being an actor of some renown, he was able to call in some of the … Read more
Timothée Chalamet spent five years in training for Marty Supreme, dragging a table-tennis table from one film to the next, so he could hone his skills by banging out a few games between takes. There’s lots of spare time on film sets, especially on the sort of big productions Chalamet has got used to appearing … Read more
Dazed and Confused is Richard Linklater’s 1993 film doing for 1976 what George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) did for 1962. That is, it looks back fondly at a group of teenagers on the cusp of adult life on their last day/night of high school, while also observing how long ago it now all was, and … Read more
In January 2011 the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada, shut down. By July of the same year the town’s zip code had been discontinued. Nomadland makes personal a phenomenon that’s been going on for decades but has accelerated since the big crash of 2008. Of displaced older blue-collar workers who lose their homes and … Read more
As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and sumptuous catalogue of the excesses of a monarch clearly off his chump. It got hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – the … Read more
First broadcast on 21 December 1963 – a more obviously Christmas-y episode would go out the following week – Death a la Carte is pretty much The Avengers as usual. Which means: exotic foreigners, death served up in unusual ways and a bit of stealth undercover work for Steed and/or Gale. Both are incognito this … Read more
The original title of The Animal Kingdom is Le Règne Animal, because it’s a French movie. That’s why you most likely haven’t heard of it and also probably why it isn’t the global phenomenon it should be. First, let’s be clear that it’s nothing to do with Animal Kingdom, David Michôd’s superbly gnarly Australian crime … Read more