Author Rachel Brook

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...

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...