The only flaw in the magnificent The Return is that, by virtue of the casting, the audience is able to predict the plot before the characters can. This is however an extremely small complaint in the grand scheme of an unusually subtle and thoughtful war movie. For one thing, it’s …
Welcome to the Modern Era of metal. The two-day festival is London’s newest metal festival; taking place in the famous New Cross Inn in south London – one of the most iconic venues for the scene. It’s a barricade free venue famed for its intense pits; and the all-day nature …
Cinema represents reality by allowing us to imagine ourselves in situations that may seem far from our daily existence. In her directorial debut, Mexican director Urzula Barba Hopfner envisions the life of Corina (Naian González Norvind), an agoraphobic woman. She has an anxiety disorder that affects her when she is …
Long Day’s Journey into Night has been a core of the theatrical canon since its 1956 debut. It won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for its author, Eugene O’Neill, and has been in worldwide repertory ever since. The role of the mother, Mary Tyrone, is one of the best in the …
In The End, Joshua Oppenheimer turns his camera from documentary towards fiction while continuing his exploration of the lies people tell themselves. The film opens with a young man (George Mackay) painstakingly painting miniature figures and landscapes onto a large diorama; on closer inspection, the diorama seems to encapsulate a …
Luck is not a belief unique to Americans, but The Luckiest Man in America – a half-fictionalised dramatisation of real events directed by Samir Oliveros – makes the case that no one commits to the myth of random good fortune with as much aplomb as does the denizens of the …
At this year’s iteration of the Edinburgh Film Festival, I sat down with director Will Seefried to discuss his debut feature Lilies Not For Me. The film explores the relationship between old school friends Owen (Fionn O’Shea) and Phillip (Robert Aramayo) as they begin a homosexual relationship in the quiet …
The Sundance Film Festival is a home for independent cinema. It’s somewhere for creatives and filmmakers to express themselves through obscure art. Being so obscure can lead to many films garnering a pulverizing response. It can sometimes lead films down the awards show circuit, like 2022’s best picture winner, Coda, …
If there’s one person you want to cast in your movie about a man waging war against local thugs, who slowly but surely has a mental collapse, it’s the ever-eccentric Nicolas Cage. Pair Cage with Lorcan Finnegan, director of bizarre suburban horror Vivarium, and you have a match made in …
In the contemporary era, one legendary band that has made a profound impact is the British band, Coldplay. For years, they have managed to capture everyone’s attention by creating music that’s pretty unique and relies on connection. Moreover, they put on some of the best concerts of this generation, making each …
Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, has attempted to meet the current moment by telling a story of horrendous racism and child abuse with neither racism nor violence in it. This is worse than the biographies of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr. …
At first glance, Armand – from writer and director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel in his feature debut – seems cut from the same cloth as Roman Polanski’s 2011 film Carnage and Fran Kranz’s 2021 film Mass: thrillers of the interpersonal, where parents of squabbling, troubled, or otherwise problematic children come together …
Universal Language, the latest from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, follows Abdolreza Kahani’s A Shrine as another delightful Iranian-Canadian comedy hitting the 2024 international film festival circuit – a welcome trend, judging by the quality of these two excellent films. Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Rankin, a vignette structure …
A good story is about people with a problem and their attempts to solve it. Sometimes the problems are large – aliens are attacking! – and sometimes they are smaller. In Sofa, So Good, the problem is how to get a cheap sofa across town when you don’t have a …
The manic pixie dream girl trope, where an eccentric young woman exists solely to expand and incite growth in a male protagonist, is criticised widely for lacking dimensional fortitude. Yet it continues to be utilised as a narrative framework, and too often without insight into the girl at the heart …
Pitchfork London has been a unique event in the festival circuit. A City festival situated over a week in the heart of London; it has seen an expert curation of artists from around the world – the most talented rising stars, big names and end-of-year list favourites. Already this past …
There are few subjects more emotive than motherhood, but a story about a new way to enable motherhood/parenthood should not have taken why that is as granted. On stage before the world premiere of Joy at the London Film Festival, director Ben Taylor and star James Norton both spoke about the …
From the moment the programme for the London Film Festival was announced, Nickel Boys quickly became one of my most anticipated films of the entire festival. Not only did the film receive positive reviews after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of August, but its …
Animation is often seen as a genre for children, but that is because it is a genre for imagination. It’s a way of visually expressing stories that cannot be realistically or safely acted out. The stop-motion Memoir of a Snail, which has surprisingly won Best Film at this year’s London …
Timestalker, the sophomore directorial feature of writer-director Alice Lowe, takes the Shakespearean adage “The course of true love never did run smooth” to its most extreme and fantastical conclusion. Lowe plays Agnes, a woman who lives an ordinary life with only a nagging, unplaceable inkling that something is missing. More …