Rating: 2.5★
A hundred years old. Let that sink in for a moment. Robert and Frances H. Flaherty's Moana has just turned a century, and watching it now, you're genuinely staring at a piece of film history unlike almost anything else. It's widely regarded as the
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in They Will Kill You that I keep coming back to. The screen goes almost completely black, and all you can see is a flaming axe carving through the darkness, each swing briefly illuminating a fight in bloody, flickering flashes. It's properly spectacular,
Rating: 2.5★
Three films in, and I'm starting to think Evil Dead and I are just not meant for each other. I went into Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise having already sat through both the original and Evil Dead II, neither of which exactly set my world on
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in Utama where the two elderly leads simply stand and stare out across a vast, bone-dry Bolivian plateau, the sky enormous above them, the silence total. It's a genuinely arresting image. The trouble is, that moment arrives about twenty minutes in, and
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching a film fumble a genuinely great idea, and The Pod Generation had me feeling that frustration almost from the first frame. The premise is properly interesting: in the near future, couples can carry their baby in a detachable
Rating: 2.5★
Will Smith is one of the most frustrating actors working today, and I mean that in the most conflicted way possible. The man is either absolutely brilliant or completely terrible, with very little middle ground in between. I've felt that watching Hancock, I've felt it watching
Raindance Film Festival
Nuri Cihan Özdoğan's debut feature Dead Dogs Don't Bite takes its premise more or less straight from the headlines. After China stopped accepting the world's plastic waste in 2018, Turkey became one of the biggest destinations for Europe's discarded rubbish, and the
Rating: 2.5★
Look, I'm not going to pretend Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a good film. It isn't. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: it's a better film than I thought it would be, and that counts for something. Not
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of watching The Last Video Store that works perfectly: it's late, you're on your own, you've got a soft drink and nothing else demanding your attention. Under those conditions, this 2023 Canadian comedy-horror from directors Tim Rutherford and
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Tiger Stripes where you can feel the film it wants to be, and it's a genuinely exciting one. A young Malaysian girl, Zaffan, becomes the first among her friends to menstruate, and the world around her shifts in that quiet, cruel
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of She Paradise that I think would have been genuinely special. You can feel it in the bones of the thing, in its colours and its music and above all in the young woman at its centre. Director Maya Cozier clearly has a gift for
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