The Dead Don’t Die – Edinburgh Film Festival Review Carmen Paddock June 24, 2019 Reviews There is always that friend at parties who tells the same joke on repeat – one which delights them more than the listeners and gets endlessly rephrased with diminishing returns. This is the personification...
Toy Story 4 – Review David Brake June 24, 2019 Reviews Is Toy Story 4 anything more than one last wring of the franchise towel to drain those last few dollars out? Disney has decided today’s audiences require "new" versions of their 1990s classics such as The...
Child’s Play – Review Jack King June 21, 2019 Reviews "A white guy murdered in the middle of a watermelon patch. Poetic." This isn't a line from Jordan Peele's latest horror-infused racial satire Us, nor does it come from the atrocious reboot of Shaft. This is a...
Men in Black: International – Review Jack Blackwell June 21, 2019 Reviews We’ve had quite a few terrible blockbusters so far in 2019 – hello Dark Phoenix, Hellboy, and Godzilla – but, none of them have left as little an impression as Men in Black: International, a forgettable...
She’s Missing – Edinburgh Film Festival 2019 Review Carmen Paddock June 20, 2019 Reviews In the final minutes of Alexandra McGuinness’ soul-searching narrative, one of the protagonists is told that "every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness". While She’s Missing evocatively captures this...
Boyz in the Wood – Edinburgh Film Festival 2019 Review Carmen Paddock June 20, 2019 Reviews Hot Fuzz meets Trainspotting in this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival opener: a farce that weaves every throwaway gag and ridiculous scenario into a raucous, joyous paean to youthful...
Brightburn – Review Phil W. Bayles June 20, 2019 Reviews There’s a whole subgenre of superhero comics that came about from asking ‘what if?’ As in, what if Batman was a vampire? What if the Avengers had been around in Elizabethan England? Now David...
The Brink – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews For what seems like the hundredth time, Steve Bannon positions himself next to a young woman for a photograph. With a flourish, he says "you go in the middle – a rose between two thorns." By the end of The...
Border South – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews Border South is the story of the migrant trail that leads from southern Mexico to the United States. The documentary explores life on the trail, alongside the lives of a Nicaraguan migrant and an American...
XY Chelsea – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews Tim Travers Hawkins’ documentary film XY Chelsea follows two years in the life of whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning. In 2010, Manning leaked thousands of classified US government documents to...
Danny – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Jack King June 13, 2019 Reviews What is one spurred to do when facing their own mortality? Co-directors Aaron Zeghers & Lewis Bennett evoke this question throughout Danny: a flawed, if immensely personal, 50-minute documentary compiled...
Don’t Be a Dick About It – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Jack King June 10, 2019 Reviews A documentary doesn't always have to be didactic in order to teach. As is true for real life, it's often through passive observation that we learn much not only about the subject at hand, but also of...
Jawline – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Stephanie Watts June 9, 2019 Reviews The opening of Jawline is not dissimilar to a scene from Ingrid Goes West. 16 year-old Austyn Tester is on an impromptu, increasingly long photoshoot, posing and giving pointers to his friend who’s in the...
Corporate Animals – Sundance London Review Joni Blyth June 7, 2019 Reviews Faux-eco-friendly corporations. Workplace discrimination. Startup culture. Corporate Animals is one trade union song away from a revolutionary call to arms, and all the better for it. Politically speaking,...
Late Night – Review Alex Goldstein June 7, 2019 Reviews Art spins from timely to dated on a dime. Late Night packs in references that are bound to instantly age as it examines the media landscape in the age of so-called diversity hires, #MeToo and social media...