Rating: 3.5★
The story behind This Is Not a Film is almost more extraordinary than anything within it. In 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was handed a six-year prison sentence and a staggering twenty-year ban on making films, for the crime of supporting the opposition during Iran's
Rating: 2.5★
You could be forgiven, watching The Arbor, for not quite knowing what it is you are looking at. There are actors, clearly performing scenes, and yet it plainly isn't fiction. So is it a documentary, a mockumentary, something else again? The answer, it turns out, is a clever
Rating: 3.5★
There is something quietly extraordinary about the project behind A Thousand Suns, and it starts with a piece of cinema history. Back in 1973, the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki, a landmark of African cinema about two young lovers dreaming of escape to Paris. It is a
Rating: 1.0★
On paper, a silent, hour-long film about the life cycle of a container ship, built, sailed and eventually scrapped, sounds like a hard sell. And, well, it is. Peter Hutton's At Sea follows a freighter from construction to dismantling in long, static, wordless shots. I will admit
Rating: 3.5★
Whisky is a strange one to recommend. On paper, everything about it should be a chore, and yet I found it quietly gripping in a way I did not see coming. That almost never happens to me with films like this, and I am still not entirely sure how it
Article
Marking Adam Sandler at 60: a look back across Adam's career through the films I've reviewed.
Rating: 2.0★
I'll say this for Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind: I understood exactly what it was going for. And understanding what a film is going for is, unfortunately, not the same thing as enjoying it, or even finding it fully alive as a piece of cinema. John Gianvito&
Rating: 3.5★
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 3.0★
Ousmane Sembène spent his whole career pointing his camera at injustice, and Moolaadé turned out to be his last word. That alone gives it a particular weight. When a filmmaker of his stature, widely considered the father of African cinema, chooses this as the thing he leaves behind, you sit
Rating: 2.0★
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
Rating: 4.0★
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 2.5★
If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you've already met the ghost of Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether you realised it or not. Peter Weir's 1975 film, one of the most revered things Australian cinema has produced, is the clear ancestor of that
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