Rating: 2.5★
Catherine Breillat has never been a filmmaker interested in making things easy for her audience. The French director built her reputation across a string of provocative, sexually frank features, from Romance (1999) to Fat Girl (2001), that placed the female body and female desire at the centre of the screen
Rating: 3.5★
There is a reasonable argument that the two years between 1989 and 1991 represent the single most important stretch in the history of American feature animation. The Little Mermaid had already announced the so-called Disney Renaissance with considerable force, and now the studio followed it with Beauty and the
Rating: 2.0★
The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with cinema since Paul W.S. Anderson launched the Milla Jovovich series back in 2002. That run stretched to six films, earning a certain loyal following while frustrating fans of Capcom's survival horror games in roughly equal measure. A
Rating: 3.5★
Hong Sang-soo has been making films in South Korea since the mid-1990s, and by the time The Woman Who Ran arrived in 2020 he had settled into a mode of working that is essentially his alone: low-budget, shot quickly, built around conversation, and shaped almost entirely by
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone.
Rating: 2.5★
There are films that reshape what cinema thinks it can do, and Fantasia (1940) is one of them. Released at a moment when animation was still widely regarded as a novelty medium, a thing for children and Saturday mornings, Walt Disney's production arrived as a deliberate provocation: a
Rating: 3.0★
Japanese cinema at the turn of the millennium was producing some of the most formally adventurous and commercially awkward work anywhere in the world, and The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) sits near the extreme end of that spectrum. It is, on paper, a remake of the South Korean black
Article
Child was one of the most quietly unnerving films I saw this year. It begins as a lean, morally queasy drama about a mother who will cross any line to save her own, and then, without warning, it slides the floor out from under you and becomes something else entirely.
2020s
The Influencer Project is a smart, unsettling little thriller that understands exactly what it wants to say about the age of the algorithm, and mostly says it very well. It comes from the team behind The Blair Witch Project, and that pedigree shows: this is found footage with a real
Article
Zoolander (2001) at twenty-five: a look back at the film, its making and its legacy.
2020s
Kikuyu Land was, for me, one of the best documentaries of the year, a furious, beautiful and deeply personal film that traces an unbroken line from colonial land seizures in Kenya to the multinational tea estates still profiting from that soil today. You can read my full review here. It
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 1990s, Batman: The Animated Series had already done something rather unusual: it had convinced a generation of children, and more than a few adults, that a Saturday-morning cartoon could be genuinely moody, even emotionally serious. The series arrived in 1992 with its own aesthetic language, a
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