Reviewed by Rachael Kaines The new Peter Rabbit film has many tell-tale signs of an absolute stinker. Take some beloved British children’s stories, written by a woman who refused to sell out her characters to Disney, add a few much derided actors (one in particular who has made a leap across the pond that has stoked this disdain ever further), plus live action animation of animals telling jokes and singing…
Read MoreFilm Review: I Got Life!
Reviewed by Lee Hill I Got Life! is a deceptively slight film about the shifting moods and epiphanies one experiences in middle age. Having just turned 50, Aurore (Agnès Jaoui), a divorcee with two daughters living in La Rochelle, France, is hit not just by the onset of early menopause, but an omnipresent sense of how quickly youthful energy and potential can dissipate in mid-life. After walking out of a…
Read MoreFilm Review: Sweet Country
Reviewed by Lee Hill Sweet Country is a sympathetic, but unsentimental look at one of many turning points in the tortured relations between aboriginal peoples and white Australians. Set in 1929, Mick, an embittered and alcoholic war veteran (Thomas M. Wright) buys a station in a remote part of New South Wales. With little farming know-how, he enlists the aid of Fred Smith, his closest neighbour (Sam Neill), a born-again…
Read MoreFilm Review: You Were Never Really Here
Reviewed by Lee Hill It is nice to see Lynne Ramsay back from Director Jail. In 2013, Ramsay had a very public falling out with the producers of the western Jane Got A Gun, which was completed by Gavin O’Connor. As often happens when a director is replaced early in shooting the rumour mill went into overdrive (see also Joseph Strick being replaced by George Cukor on Justine, Ken Russell…
Read MoreFilm Review: Gholam
Reviewed by Lee Hill Gholam (Shahab Hosseini), the title character of this mordant portrait of an exile in extremis, is a shy, laconic Iranian military veteran in his 30s. He survives on the margins of the expatriate community in London by driving a mini-cab at night and odd jobs at a garage during the day. When not sleeping in a grim, mold encrusted studio flat, he spends his meagre free-time…
Read MoreFilm Review: A Fantastic Woman
Reviewed by Linda Marric A few films have managed to garner the kind of good will directed at Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio’s brilliantly well observed feature A Fantastic Woman. Nominated for a foreign language Oscar at this weekend’s Academy Awards, the film offers a wonderfully complex, engaging and thoroughly affecting account of a young trans woman’s battle against preconceived ideas about gender and sexuality in a traditional latin society. Staring…
Read MoreFilm Review: The Nile Hilton Incident
Reviewed by Rachael Kaines Tarik Saleh delivers with The Nile Hilton Incident a compelling and taut thriller, that manages to remain engaging and unpredictable right up to its end. The transportation of the specific Scandi thriller style, with all its preoccupation with corruption and mistreatment of unseen minorities to Egypt works very well. A lot of the issues this type of thriller tends to deal, corruption and accountability for crimes,…
Read MoreFilm Review: Finding Your Feet
Reviewed by Rachael Kaines Finding Your Feet, the new film directed by Richard Loncraine (Wimbledon), features an all-star cast in a predictable, but fun flick. Great performances and funny moments make up for a story that loses momentum partway through. Finding Your Feet is an enjoyable, but flawed comedy/drama.
Read MoreFilm Review: The Touch
Reviewed by Lee Hill The reissue of the rarely seen 1971 film, The Touch, Ingmar Bergman’s first collaboration with an American studio, is part of a retrospective now playing at the British Film Institute until the end of March. Whether seen separately or with other Bergman films (the BFI is also promoting Persona, The Seventh Seal and The Magic Flute), The Touch, despite its problematic history, confirms the director’s reputation…
Read MoreDVD Release: Brimstone
Reviewed by Nadia Bee Out of all the imaginable Wild Wests, director Martin Koolhaven has conjured up, in Brimstone, a world where fear and resistance meet overwhelming sadism. Scenes of intolerable cruelty unfold in visually sumptuous settings, with music -by Junkie XL – to match. Meanwhile the lives those scenes depict are harsh, dour, and almost entirely without respite. This is a grand film, with an ambitious story and an…
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