Oscars 2018: Live Blog

Follow our live blog and find who won what as the night progresses. You can have a look at all of the nominees we have reviewed,  the Screenwords predictions, and all of our writers’ “best of 2017” thoughts meanwhile. And of course @screen_words and founding editor @linda_marric will be on Twitter into the small hours. Winners in bold. Best Picture: Call Me by Your Name Darkest Hour Dunkirk Get Out Lady…

Read More

Oscars 2018: Our Predictions

Rachael Kaines shares her Oscars 2018 wish list. The Oscars are here again. After the snafu of last year and the extremely unlikely event of the voters actually picking the best film for best film, all bets are off this year. “Oscar bait” films seem to be doing worse year on year, which makes for much better pickings and increasingly harder to predict winners. Here are some predictions, or rather…

Read More

Film 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 More

Film 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 More

Report: I, Tonya Press Conference

Report by Amon Warmann I, Tonya has been a big player in this year’s awards season, and for good reason. Margot Robbie delivers a career-best performance as Tonya Harding – an ex figure skating champion with a shocking story to tell – and she’s ably supported by an eye-catching turn from Allison Janney, Harding’s overbearing mother.

Read More

Film 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 More

Film 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 More

Film Review: The Shape of Water

Reviewed by Rachael Kaines With The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro has finally returned to form. A charming and beautiful romance as well as a tale (tail) of underdogs (fish) of all shapes and sizes. del Toro manages to represent many marginalised aspects of society in the setting of America during the cold war (even a group we never knew were marginalised — fish men).

Read More

DVD 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…

Read More