Author Rachel Brook

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...

Do Melissa McCarthy movies get less funny as she gets more famous? Life of the Party, McCarthy’s latest collaboration with her writer-director husband Ben Falcone, suggests yes. What sounds like a riotous,...

Mary and the Witch’s Flower has more imagination in its first sixty seconds than some entire films manage across their runtime. As you’d expect from a team that includes ex-Ghibli employees, the first...

This is a strong week for releases, so under no circumstances should you see I Feel Pretty. Its reference points are Just My Luck, Shallow Hal, and The Devil Wears Prada, in that order. It amalgamates set ups...

This film was previously reviewed on 22/06/17 as part of EIFF. From the synopsis, Modern Life is Rubbish could be accused of rehashing High Fidelity, yet it more than justifies its existence. It’s a...

This Friday will deliver Tully, a drama about motherhood from the stunning team of director Jason Reitman, writer Diablo Cody and actress Charlize Theron. Reitman and Cody, of course, first worked together on...

Marvel's 2018 slate steps up a gear (or several) with the massive Avengers: Infinity War following February's Black Panther into cinemas. Our Bertie scored Infinity War the full five stars, finding it "a...

Spike Lee’s Pass Over brings Antoinette Nwandu’s play of the same name to the screen, delivering something that’s neither a fresh work nor your run-of-the-mill filmed play. Pass Over begins with shots...

Air is a thoroughly multisensory experience that will really reward those willing to surrender to and embrace a storytelling approach that embodies the ‘show don’t tell’ maxim to the extreme. The near...

Becks is the latest entry into a dramatic subgenre in which an adult prodigal daughter returns to her backwater hometown in a somewhat washed-up situation. Examples include Young Adult, Colossal, and from last...

Despite a bit of overacting, contrived drama and some pretty clunky plot devices, Snapshots is very hard not to like. Perhaps because this is a movie starring largely women, made predominantly by women, and...