★★★★★ Ruben Östlund’s The Square won the Palme d’Or in 2017. A social satirist, he loves nothing better than to skewer bourgeois pretentions, his past targets include masculinity and the art world. In his new film, Triangle of Sadness (2022), the Swedish director takes a bunch of brash and manipulative...
★★★★★ Humans are changing. Humans are … evolving. In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, people have started to grow extra organs in their bodies, whose functions are yet to be discerned. Some, like Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), have used this biological development for a new type of performance art....
★★☆☆☆ George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) is such a tedious grind from start to finish, it feels three thousand years long in running time. A ponderous and flat entry in the Australian maestro’s slim filmography, which outside of the Mad Max franchise has always been a bit...
★★★★☆ There is such a thing as too famous. Elvis Presley, king of rock ‘n’ roll, was too famous. In Baz Luhrmann’s excellent new film, the life of the 20th century icon of American culture and music is viewed through the eyes of unreliable narrator, the so-called "Colonel" Tom Parker...
The 75th edition of the Festival de Cannes has drawn to a close. A return to a semblance of normalcy after two years of global horror caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it was time again to congregate at the church of cinema and enjoy, or hate, but as long as...
★★☆☆☆ Spanish director Albert Serra’s so-called "anti-thriller" takes place in French Polynesia. In it, the island’s High Commissioner, De Roller (Benoit Magimel), begins to hear rumours about France resuming nuclear testing in the area. He does see signs of movement too; engineers showing up, the navy, but isn’t sure if...
★★★★☆ Are you ready to feel the need for speed again? Top Gun: Maverick (2022), arriving 36 years after the Tony Scott original, is a fly into the danger zone you won’t forget in a hurry. While it’s had more delays than a Ryanair flight to Malaga, the wait is...
★★★★☆ 2017’s Japanese zombie comedy, One Cut of the Dead, became a word-of-mouth sensation on the festival circuit. Boasting a clever film-within-a-film setup, it revealed itself to be anything but the same old zombie apocalypse yarn, more a charming celebration of guerrilla filmmaking, artistic creativity, thinking on your feet and...
★★★★★ In the Iranian city of Mashhad, between 2000-2001, a serial killer murdered 16 prostitutes. Upon capture, Saeed Azimi told the authorities he was doing the work of God, cleaning his home city of vice and moral corruption. Many in the country appeared to believe him and rallied against his...