Author Rachel Brook

Like Cartoon Saloon’s The Breadwinner, The Skier launches headlong into the vivid and colourful world of a determined child on a critical mission. Similarities between the two Middle East-set films end there...

Christina Choe’s superb feature debut Nancy is paradoxically both compelling and repulsive. Andrea Riseborough anchors the narrative by embodying a character whose odd behaviour is as riveting as it is...

Skate Kitchen is a fantastically evocative low-key tale of a teenage girl’s coming of age within the skate subculture of New York City. Of course, this subject matter recalls Drew Barrymore’s Ellen...

Crazy Rich Asians begins like an all-Asian Gossip Girl yet ascends to very dizzy heights, offering a worthy twenty-first century update of Ang Lee’s ‘90s romantic comedies. Once Rachel (Wu) and Nick...

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is a far cry from the muggy atmosphere of his 2004 English-language feature My Summer of Love. As the title suggests, Cold War’s romance takes place in and is defined by...

Spike Lee is back with the characteristically audacious and opinionated BlacKkKlansman, and according to our Senior Features Ed, Tom, this is nothing but good. Tom awarded the latest Spike Lee joint a...

The Children Act is not the courtroom procedural you might expect. Ian McEwan’s screenplay – and his novel before it – has plenty up its sleeve beyond the premise’s proffering of a delicious...

In this return to the Hundred Acre Wood, Disney do what they do best. Christopher Robin is proper old-fashioned filmmaking. Money is well spent on a perfectly cast Ewan McGregor and on bringing ‘40s London...

In synopsis, you’d be forgiven for thinking Mario sounds a lot like Ben A. William’s The Pass. Both interrogate homophobia in the world of professional football via the highly emotive stories of two...

Adrift brings nothing new to the tradition of lost-at-sea movies, despite director Baltasar Kormákur’s prior experience with the genre – his similarly premised The Deep picked up a raft of European film...

Craig Johnson has never matched 2014’s The Skeleton Twins, and Alex Strangelove doesn’t change that. It’s an affable entry to the high school movie genre, and squeezes in several pleasant surprises...

The Tale is a spiralling and endlessly fascinating work. Non-fiction filmmaker Jennifer Fox applies her documentarian’s eye to her own childhood, peeling back onion-like layers of memory and teasingly...

Never Goin’ Back takes a sitcom-esque premise and actually shapes it into a viable movie. Unlike many similar ventures it does have enough narrative material to work with, but it’s an awkward...

Formally, Half the Picture isn’t a revolutionary piece of documentary filmmaking, but it doesn’t need to be. Amy Adrion responds to an extremely relevant and inflammatory issue with urgency and fierce...

Skate Kitchen is a fantastically evocative low-key tale of a teenage girl’s coming of age within the skate subculture of New York City. Of course, this subject matter recalls Drew Barrymore’s Ellen...