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
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
Rating: 1.5★
Blame the algorithm. Tina Romero's Queens of the Dead had just finished, I was already in a zombie mood with my critical faculties suitably loosened, and before I'd even reached for the remote the next thing had started playing. That next thing was The Video Dead,
Rating: 3.5★
(500) Days of Summer opens by telling you, in as many words, that it is "not a love story, but a story about love." That is true, as far as it goes, but I would argue the framing is still a little off: this is a story about
Rating: 3.5★
The question at the heart of Saint Maud is a wonderfully simple, unnerving one: is this young woman a saint in the making, or is she quietly losing her mind? That single ambiguity, held carefully and never cheaply resolved, is what makes Rose Glass's debut such a compulsive
Rating: 3.5★
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter. This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter
Rating: 2.5★
Let me be straight with you: I kept having to remind myself, the whole way through Rags, to judge it for what it actually is rather than what I might want it to be. And what it is, plainly, is a straight-to-television teen musical. A modern, gender-flipped
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like an act of love, and Bel is one of those. Louise Lockwood's portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who performed and recorded as Heir of the Cursed, is a tender,
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