Rating: 3.5★
There is a shot lodged in my head from Garrett Bradley's Time: a home video, slightly washed out, of small boys larking about in the way small boys do, and then the film cuts, and those same boys are teenagers, and then young men, and the years have
2020s
Macbeth in Compton had no right to work as well as it does. Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, relocated to the palm lined streets of Compton, spoken in full Elizabethan verse but subtitled in the modern slang of the block. On paper it sounds like a gimmick that ought to
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
Rating: 3.0★
There is something a little strange about rating a thirteen-minute short film the same way you would rate a feature. What are you even measuring? Hotel Chevalier runs barely long enough to justify making a cup of tea, and yet here I am, genuinely glad I spent time with
Rating: 1.0★
There is a genuinely haunting idea at the centre of Decasia: The State of Decay, and I want to be fair to it before I explain why the film itself was one of the most punishing viewing experiences I have put myself through in recent memory. Bill Morrison builds the
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you would never stumble upon in a hundred years without actively going looking, and Sea and the Jungle is absolutely one of them. A fifty-two-minute documentary from São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island nation in the Gulf of Guinea whose entire cinematic output would
Rating: 0.5★
There is a version of cinema that asks you to slow down, to breathe, to let images and language wash over you without the usual apparatus of plot or performance. I understand that. I have even enjoyed it. But there is another version, rarer and less forgiving, that asks all
Rating: 2.0★
There is a version of this review where I rave about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. I genuinely wanted to. The idea is irresistible: a film-maker plants himself in a great European city for a single day, dawn to dusk, and simply watches, lets the trains and the
Rating: 3.5★
Where a classic noir like Pickup on South Street or The Third Man prowls the rain-slicked back streets, The Reckless Moment brings the genre home. Quite literally. Max Ophüls plants his camera not in some seedy waterfront dive or fog-wrapped European alley but in a comfortable suburban household,
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Ariel when our newly unemployed protagonist, handed a convertible and precious little else by a despairing colleague, simply points the car south and drives. No grand speech, no swelling music. Just a man and a road and the vague hope that Helsinki might
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Sexy Beast where Gal Dove, retired safecracker, is dozing by his swimming pool in the Spanish sunshine, the very picture of a man who has successfully left his old life behind, and you think: this is going to be a pleasant little film about
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
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