When the world is a smorgasbord of tastes and sensations you can’t blame someone for wanting to sample it all, but at a certain point you’ve got to admit you know what you prefer. The gimmick of the novel Allegro Pastell is a very good one: it’s the text and …
Documentary filmmaking also works as a personal chamber for filmmakers to pour their hearts into films. Throughout the diary or poetic non-fiction, the directors can discuss their personal lives, the formality of cinema, and themes they are passionate about. It is a chance to unveil themselves and the world surrounding …
The central couple at the heart of this complex Pakistani movie have known each other from around the village since childhood. They are thrown together because everyone else considers them damaged goods. The way they deal with their damage, separately and together, enables an unusual depiction of the power struggles …
After the movie is over but before the credits there is some explanatory text that makes Sukkwan Island aka My Father’s Island very difficult to review. For one thing, discussing them spoils the entire concept of the film. For another, it blurs the line between fiction and real life in …
Effi (Leisa Gwenllian) is a person and Blaenau Ffestiniog is the name of the village where she lives. In Welsh – everyone’s first language in this wonderful little film – the title therefore means “Effi from Blaenau.” (It’s pronounced Blay-nah.) It is an adaption of a one-woman play by Gary …
Who’d be young? With your whole life ahead of you and no sense of who you’re truly are, you live in anticipation of a brilliant future that will obviously come to pass somehow. On the other hand, who’d be old? Either you had your chance and it didn’t work out, …
Based on James McBride’s award-winning novel, the 2020 Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird takes an uproariously irreverent approach to some of the most tumultuous times in United States history – namely, militant abolitionist John Brown and his 1859 raid on the US military armoury at Harper’s Ferry, events that …
It has taken decades, but Patricia Cornwell’s iconic literary character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has finally been brought to life. Nicole Kidman takes on the role of the unrelenting chief medical examiner trying to prove that the case that made her career wasn’t based on misinformation. Scarpetta is more than your …
The first series in a name chronology series from super-producer Ryan Murphy follows the tragic romance of JFK’s son, John F Kennedy, and publicist Carolyn Bessette. Based on Elizabeth Beller’s book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the limited series charts the couple’s whirlwind romance, marriage …
This Chilean-Argentinian coproduction is a Chilean story but was filmed in Argentina for reasons its subject matter makes obvious. The military coup in Chile in 1973 that started with the murder of Salvador Allende brought about (speaking with understatement here) such a traumatic time to the nation that the after-effects …
Talk about melodrama! It is not so much that this adaption of Wuthering Heights goes to eleven, but that this version of Wuthering Heights starts at eleven and keeps going and going, and going, without losing its momentum for a moment. This over-the-top depiction of secret and dangerous passion makes …
2025 has been a strong year of Stephen King adaptations. These include It: Welcome to Derry, The Running Man, and The Life of Chuck. One of the darkest would have to go to the adaptation of his story The Long Walk directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games franchise). Set …
The representation of queerness in the past decade on TV has found itself on an uptick. Shows like Heartstopper, Queer Eye, Modern Family, and Schitt’s Creek have led the charge in normalising the existence of queer people on television, and therefore in life. Despite the challenges the queer characters face …
Filipino genre filmmaker Pedring Lopez world premiered his first English-language film, the neo-noir thriller Shadow Transit, at last year’s QCinema International Film Festival. An independent co-production between the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada, Shadow Transit centers on a chance encounter between a grieving singer-photographer and a drifting DJ, resulting in …
The central plot point of The Stranger – a coloniser kills one of the colonised, and there are consequences – lands very differently now that it did when the original novella was published by Albert Camus in occupied France in 1942. For one thing, the world is trying with mixed …
The introductory section of Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister (La petite dernière) is slightly alienating, as it swiftly moves from one scene to the next, without an anchor point for the audience to latch onto, despite being adapted from Fatima Daas’ 2020 autofiction novel of the same name. However, our …
The British multi-artist Charlie Shackleton is among the most fascinating figures in modern non-fiction. Throughout his extensive catalogue of short films, the director discussed criticism in the TikTok era, low-budget film production in the 1990s, but his most well-known work is a 607-minute static shot of paint drying on a brick …
There’s a lot going on in the little town of Hawkins, Indiana, and none of it’s good. With so much going on in the Upside Down and with Vecna, it can be easy to forget that there are plenty of normal problems, too. While searching for Vecna, Nancy stumbles across …
A sweet young girl with a dark past becomes the live-in help for a troubled couple and ends up being exactly what the husband needs to heal his broken heart. Sounds like a classic Hallmark movie, doesn’t it? But turns out this story is closer to Hitchcock than Hallmark because …
It’s over, the Joker is dead, and Gotham is saved. There is a lot of cleaning up to do and a lot of people who need help, but Bruce Wayne can handle it; Batman is no longer needed. Or is he? There is still a lot of crime in Gotham. …