American Psycho – My First Time Film Review Carmen Paddock March 25, 2020 Reviews In this new series of articles, our writers are watching classic films for the first time. We begin with Carmen catching up on Mary Harron's American Psycho. Mary Harron’s brutal satire of corporate...
The Truth – Review Carmen Paddock March 21, 2020 Reviews This film was previously reviewed as part of our Glasgow Film Festival coverage in March 2020. As the truth becomes a more and more contentious issue in contemporary media, The Truth feels a throwback to a...
The Lawyer – BFI Flare 2020 Review Carmen Paddock March 20, 2020 Reviews The intersection of identities, oppressions, and politics run through Romas Zabarauskas’ latest feature, which follows a Lithuanian corporate lawyer as he finds himself at personal and professional limits...
Radioactive – Review Phil W. Bayles March 18, 2020 Reviews Radioactive should have been a slam dunk. The life of Marie Curie is ripe for cinematic adaptation, and this one is directed by Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian filmmaker behind the autobiographical...
Swallow – Review Alysha Prasad March 14, 2020 Reviews Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ film Swallow stars Haley Bennett as Hunter, a housewife distraught by her recent pregnancy who develops pica, an eating disorder that makes her crave objects that could potentially...
Misbehaviour – Review Carmen Paddock March 13, 2020 Reviews Philippa Lowthorpe’s latest feature immediately roots itself in its historical moment: before its opening title Misbehaviour has cut between divorced London mother interviewing for a spot at university, a...
Bacurau – Review Josefine Algieri March 12, 2020 Reviews This film was previously reviewed as part of our Munich Film Festival coverage in July 2019. Bacurau is a sprawling genre hybrid, a semi-futuristic Western with a strong political undercurrent. The...
Calm With Horses – Review Carmen Paddock March 12, 2020 Reviews This film was previously reviewed as part of our London Film Festival coverage in October 2019. Nick Rowland’s feature debut, based on a short story, starts with explosive, explicit violence that...
The Hunt – Review Phil W. Bayles March 11, 2020 Reviews It’s easy to see why The Hunt was shelved last year following a spate of mass shootings in the US. Not because it’s violent – it is, but not emphatically more so than many other films released since –...
And Then We Danced – Review Phil W. Bayles March 11, 2020 Reviews There’s a curious paradox at the heart of And Then We Danced. The traditional dancing practised at the Georgian National Ensemble in Tbilisi is built on discipline and hyper-masculinity. “There is no room...
Fire Will Come – Review Calum Baker March 8, 2020 Reviews Compelling images open this rural slow-burner, the third feature from French-Galician writer-director Oliver Laxe. A sea of trees, bathed in nocturnal blue, begins slowly – mysteriously – to collapse: one...
Fantasy Island – Review Alysha Prasad March 7, 2020 Reviews Fantasy Island centres around five people: Gwen, Melanie, Patrick, and brothers Brax and J.D., all of whom have won a contest to stay on Fantasy Island. They are enticed to stay by the man who runs the...
Charlatan – Berlinale 2020 Review Josefine Algieri March 6, 2020 Reviews After last year’s Mr Jones, prolific Polish director Agnieszka Holland returns to the screen with another biographic film; for as outlandish as it may seem, the story of the ‘Oracle of Urine’ is very...
One Taxi Ride – GFF 2020 Review Carmen Paddock March 3, 2020 Reviews A homespun quality is immediately noted in One Taxi Ride. Mac CK’s documentary frames a meandering introduction to Erick, a 27-year-old man living in Mexico City, through a far from polished presentation:...
Welcome to Chechnya – Berlinale 2020 Review Josefine Algieri March 2, 2020 Reviews In 2017 a raid on drugs became the starting point of persecution of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya. Since then, countless people have suffered torture, disappeared, and died – penalised not only by a government...