Reviews

Both booed and applauded at the end of its first screening at Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a raucous, vicious horror-thriller that also happens to be utter nonsense. It hangs together...

The Vault appeared out of nowhere. This Dan Bush production surreptitiously snuck up on moviegoers, luring them with a retro-styled poster, promising an equally retro-looking James Franco alongside two...

After the much-loved, yet much-feared, 1986 Stephen King source novel and classic 1990 TV miniseries, arguably the most famous work of coulrophobia-inducing fiction hits the big screen awash with hype. What a...

Taylor Sheridan has made his name as the writer of gritty, sincere action films like Sicario and Hell or High Water, and it’s fair to say he doesn’t change a winning formula with his directorial debut,...

As hinted by its nicely simple title, Jim & Andy is a documentary exploring the brilliant but difficult comedy minds of Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman, centring on how those minds became one on the...

A rare foray into more genre-style filmmaking for master of small family dramas Hirokazu Koreeda, The Third Murder is a slow-burning, twisty mystery that is ultimately too convoluted to really satisfy as a...

Deliberately opaque for its first 20 minutes, it’s hard to see exactly what film Sebastiano Riso’s Una Famiglia actually is for a good while after it starts. Come the end, you’ll wish it never revealed...

A sensationally funny and affecting dark comedy, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri arrived at Venice just as the festival was hitting a slump, and has reinvigorated it with a fiery passion. Martin...

The highlight of any season of the FX anthology American Horror Story is always the creepy and evocative opening titles based on whatever that year’s theme is. At 90 seconds long, they’re perfect snapshots...

Paolo Virzi’s The Leisure Seeker wastes no time getting started. No sooner are we introduced to its world than we are listening to a phone call of a son screaming at his sister that their sickly old parents...

Self-indulgent, glacially slow, and painfully boring, Robert Guédiguian’s The House by the Sea is atrocious. It’s baffling that it made it through the screening process to play in Competition at Venice,...

With mystery films, it’s often said that trailers should be avoided, and that going in blind is the best way to watch them. Suburbicon is an exception to this rule, as the final product bears very little...

The best aspect of Una is its scrambled chronology. Flashbacks break up what could otherwise be a rather repetitive two-hander, albeit one made up of fine performances from both Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn....

In 2009, Israeli writer-director and former tank gunner Samuel Maoz blew away the competition at the Venice Film Festival with his searing, Golden Lion-winning debut, Lebanon. Eight years on, Maoz returns to...

The Victorian era has provided fertile ground for cinema’s lust for murder, mystery, and debauchery, particularly around the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders. What The Limehouse Golem offers is a precursor...