Reviews

The 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival featured a film called My Name is Emily, by Simon Fitzmaurice. This year, It’s Not Yet Dark is billed as the story behind Fitzmaurice’s film. It both is and...

Appearing on screen above its English translation, the Swedish title of Amanda Kernell’s debut feature Sameblod might provoke some interesting thoughts in the minds of its English-speaking audiences. A film...

In this council estate-set psychological thriller, Toby Jones must confront his Oedipal complex after a date that goes badly wrong. During the title sequence, Carl looks through the kaleidoscope he was...

From the synopsis, Modern Life is Rubbish could be accused of rehashing High Fidelity, yet it more than justifies its existence. It’s a wonderfully evocative period drama of the past ten(ish) years, littered...

Jungle-set political satire from Amit V. Masurkar picks on the Indian electoral process as the butt of its 104-minute-long joke. Much like politics, Newton is a comedy in which two ridiculous male egos make...

Paris Can Wait, the first foray into fiction from Eleanor Coppola (wife of Francis Ford), is at best a Woody Allen-esque Americans-do-Europe travelogue, and at worst a boring and indulgent piece of wealth...

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” As part of the Focus on Poland strand, EIFF is screening Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal’s The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me. In one scene, a priest sits down to eat a...

Dangerously straddling multiple genres, Godspeed is a comedy crime caper and unlikely-friendship road movie that struggles to decidedly define itself as anything other than confused. With genre-bending beloved...

Gregg Hurwitz's screenplay for The Book of Henry has been searching for a director since the late 1990s. Watching the film, it’s not difficult to see why. Tonally, it’s all over the place. It starts as...

Here’s a drinking game for you: take a shot every time Optimus Prime feels the need to remind us of his name over the course of Transformers: The Last Knight. You’d think that, after five of these movies,...

From the first car chase – set to ‘Bellbottoms’ – Baby Driver makes its mission clear in a manner not unlike Damien Chazelle's crossover hit La La Land: this is another untraditional musical....

British cinephile par excellence, Mark Cousins, returns with another of his ambitious and high-minded cine-essays (although this is technically fictional) centred on a specific geographical location. The...

Increasingly we’re seeing films that, rather than adding a Hollywood shine to everything, offer us a realistically messy portrayal of life. That’s exactly what’s on show here - and it’s fantastic....

Whitney: Can I Be Me sees Nick Broomfield take on the iconic spectre of Asif Kapadia's Amy, and largely fail. His brief, of course, is to take on the iconic spectre of Whitney Houston, but again, we've seen...

Disjointed as a severed arm, The Mummy has a tangled knot of a plot. Its story is as confused as its grasp of mythology and geography, yet still it survives. The key to this life among certain death is,...