Reviews

In adapting a play to the screen, there’s a tough balance to strike. You have to retain the essence of the original production without the limitations of that medium carrying over into the film. Earlier this...

The ‘plane crash survival drama’ sub-genre has been visited many times on screen over the years, from The Flight of the Phoenix and Alive to Cast Away and TV’s Lost. Now, twice Oscar-nominated director...

Told in Van Gogh’s own language – through some of his letters and, quite literally, through his unmistakeable painting style – Loving Vincent is a lavish feast for the eyes. There are the vibrant yellows...

Many have heard of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, marketed as ‘The Battle of the Sexes’, but fewer may be aware of the seismic shifts in women’s tennis that prefaced the...

Razzia is a confusing and rather muddled state of affairs. Fair enough, it is presenting a set of challenging and confusing decisions with which its cast of characters must grapple. Thrusting the audience...

The kids who roam Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn are known as "beach rats". Self-medicating with a cocktail of painkillers and narcotics, they don’t lead easy lives. Eliza Hittman’s followup to her 2013 It Felt...

A redemption tale in the Xhosa language that borrows tropes of the Western, set in an ambiguous part of the Eastern Cape, Five Fingers for Marseilles really does have an exciting premise. It’s particularly...

Mudbound aims to tell an epic tale of racial tension in the 1940s Mississippi Delta, and it is an engaging – if emotionally battering – one. The film struggles, however, not to sink under its own weight....

The Ornithologist feels something like the slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, until director João Pedro Rodrigues folds in a survival-thriller plot, an encounter with Jesus, and a dizzying display of...

Following in the footsteps of recent popular crime documentaries Making a Murderer and Serial, No Stone Unturned tells the horrific story of the mass murder in Loughinisland, Northern Ireland. 23 years on and...

To call a movie set in two distinct time periods a "film of two halves" might seem overly trite, but unfortunately, it’s the best possible descriptor for Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Taking place in both...

Where you might expect familiarity, Heartstone continually complicates and deepens its "innocence lost" narrative to tell a tale both fresh and universal. Expressive kinetic camerawork conveys boyish energy,...

A sweeping and truly British love story, Breathe marks the directorial debut of Andy Serkis. He tackles the true story of Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), a young man in the late 1950s who suddenly finds his...

Without a doubt Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a masterpiece. In this new and unexpected German comedy (yes, another one!), a group of filmmakers inexplicably decide they...

Punk filmmaker F.J. Ossang, whose previous titles include Docteur Chance, Dharma Guns and the intriguingly titled Treasure of Bitch Islands, returns to the silver screen with 9 Fingers, an impressionistic and...