Author Rachel Brook

When Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released in 1986 Roger Ebert described the eponymous hero as ‘a teenager who skips school so he can help his best friend win some self-respect’. Not everyone considered...

Grandma is an excellent film, featuring an equally excellent performance from the hilarious and hell-raising Lily Tomlin in the titular role. As her pregnant teenage granddaughter Sage, Julia Garner makes a...

It should come as no surprise that Orange is the New Black alum Heder can take an improbable premise and spin it into a genre-defying tale. Thriller elements including a tense final act and overly bombastic...

With shades of Submarine, Morris from America literalises the alienation of adolescence by relocating the titular teen and making him a fish out of water. Though Markees Christmas’ charming and likeable...

The sole aspect of Other People that fails to convince is a group display of grief. However, through repetition this moment intelligently bookends the film and becomes symptomatic of the movie’s disparate...

Whole swathes of Wiener-Dog have nothing to do with the titular pooch who is ultimately only a contrived and poorly executed device for hanging four grotesque stories together. The first segment, which...

https://vimeo.com/89013451 Paul Cabon’s Tempête sur Anorak (Storm Hits Jacket) won the Short Jury Award for Animation at Sundance 2015. Recently screened by Picturehouse alongside the other winners, it...

Love and Friendship is far less funny than it should be. Most of its witty moments appeared in the trailer, and therefore lack full impact when actually seen in context. The runtime passes slowly in...

Mustang is impeccably structured. Nothing is gratuitous; each moment is conceived as part of the whole and contributes to the increasingly haunting narrative. Seemingly throwaway occurrences and lines become...

Subtle as a baseball to the head, Boyhood’s successor can be as insufferable as its heinously punctuated title; unswerving adoption of the male gaze makes narrative sense but remains...

https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/164839532 Karis Oh’s The Moment is a simple anecdote told in an enthralling monologue which ties the short together and engages from the first pitch-black frame....

This belated follow up to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman is confusingly both prequel and sequel, with Snow White’s absence awkwardly conspicuous. It threatens to be bloated, patronising, and...

This week Kristen Wiig stars in Nasty Baby, perhaps her most indie project yet – aesthetically at least. The trailer seems to promise an inky black sense of humour in the vein of Ben Wheatley’s...

https://vimeo.com/127949242 This confident and atmospheric short may not be flashy, but its ambling, observational pace and detailed soundscape piques the curiosity. With charmingly stylised visuals...

  David O. Russell’s Accidental Love, a long-gestating car crash of a production infamously daubed with a pseudonym of shame rather than Russell’s name, was screaming out for admission into the...