Reviews

Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza’s gritty and authentic formal approach on Ma’ Rosa gives us a flavourful and palpable sense of place and community – though the same can’t be said of his characters,...

There's something rather uncinematic about a phone call. They can be used in interesting and dynamic ways, but when much of a film consists of the lead character answering (and sometimes ignoring) her...

The Dardenne brothers’ take on a detective story is highly introverted and moves with a quiet confidence befitting of its heroine – however it lets itself down with an underwhelming resolution and the...

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda strikes gold yet again with this superlative and poetic portrait of another fractured family unit. Nobody paints for us the highs and lows of familial interaction quite...

About as Almodóvarian as it gets, this adaptation of a trio of Alice Munro stories brings every facet of the Spanish auteur's unmistakeable heightened and melodramatic style. The formula that constitutes...

Singer jumps at this second chance to establish the characters he first brought to the screen 16 years ago, unleashing new powers and revisiting old stories with typical invention. This is when he and the film...

Sparse and morbid, Apprentice is not the easiest watch, but the questions it raises about morality and mortality make it a gut-wrenching polemic about capital punishment. While the script is a little...

Despite the high watermark set by Starred Up, David Mackenzie betters himself once again with the immensely gratifying western Hell or High Water, a genre hybrid with a rich streak of melancholy but no...

A mobile game most people use to pass time on the toilet is not the ripest material for cinematic adaptation. The writers of The Angry Birds Movie know this, and their solution is to throw as many jokes as...

As couples therapy goes, tinkering with international espionage is an unconventional gambit. That is, however, the basic premise here. Flimsy foundation aside, Our Kind of Traitor ranks respectably within the...

This first-time feature from writer-director Michael O'Shea is both self- and genre-aware - though repeatedly acknowledging its superior forebears in the vampire genre does not equate to doing anything...

Andrea Arnold once again confirms herself as one of - if not the - best British filmmakers working today with her sprawling odyssey of the disenfranchised, American Honey. Formally not so much a...

Tina Fey deserves better than this film’s trailer, which suggested a woman who went to war because she was single and, when she got there, had a party. She deserves what Whiskey Tango Foxtrot actually...

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...

Green Room has a decent concept compared to what one might expect of a thriller/slasher flick: an unsigned band (all very credibly acted) plays a last-minute gig at a seedy, backwater venue, leading to...