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,
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.
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