Film Reviews

With his first two films, writer/director S. Craig Zahler established a distinctive voice. Working in exploitation cinema but unbound by the genre’s usual brief running times, he has stretched out his narratives, using the extra running time to dive more deeply into his characters than is typical in exploitation and to play with the genre. In Bone Tomahawk he morphed The Searchers into Cannibal Holocaust, with Brawl in Cell Block 99 he spent a good deal of time building both...

“You got a couple more years to fight” 14 year old Ronaldo tells his 9 year old half brother Titus, after spending some time teaching him to punch. He wants his younger sibling to know how to fight because, he says, nobody’s going to draw on a 9 year old. It’s just one of many sobering moments in Roberto Minervini’s beautiful and evocative portrait of a black community in Louisiana in the wake of the death of Alton Sterling and...

I have a longstanding policy at the London Film Festival of trying to discover films from new places, so whenever the chance comes to see something from a country whose cinema is entirely new to me, I try to take it. I believe this is my first Kenyan film, but it’s also something of a first for Kenya; a film about a lesbian relationship from a country where LGBTQ relationships are still punishable by law. Initially, it was banned for...

A few days ago, there was a report telling us that we have about 12 years to fundamentally change how we treat our planet, or climate change will be both irreversible and catastrophic. Alone in Space never tells us outright why the Earth was dying, meaning the giant spaceship on which we find 12 year old Gladys (Ella Rae Rappaport) and her six year old brother Keaton (Dante Fleischanderl) was built, but you could certainly fit a message about climate...

Drew Goddard’s Bad Times At The El Royale is a gripping Tarantinoesque Nixon era crime caper in which seven strangers find themselves battling it out through a stormy night at a dilapidated, and tastelessly decorated hotel which straddles the California and Nevada border. Written by Goddard himself, the film presents an ambitious and rather inspired premise, but is ultimately let down by an aimless plot and a decidedly overlong running time. Arriving at the El Royale car park on her...

“You’ll never understand, just listen to me” says Kaja (Andrea Berntzen), looking into the camera, at the beginning of this real time telling of the story of the Utøya massacre perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. Kaja isn’t talking to us but to her mother, but clearly the target of this dialogue is the audience. We arrive on the island as the teens at its political summer camp have just heard about the explosion at the Government buildings in Oslo that...

Tumbbad India’s cinema industry is the biggest in the world, and it often bothers me that I know so little about it, whether that means the Bollywood mainstream or something like Tumbbad, which feels much more independent in spirit. Told across three chapters and thirty years, Tumbbad sets up its backstory early, with the tale of the forgotten god Hastar, who stole all the gold from his mother, who created the world and the other gods. Legend has it that...

The opening to First Man is an intense, dizzying few minutes which you hope is a dream sequence as it cannot be real life. The sound is deafening, the rickety nature of the X15 aircraft Armstrong is flying, brought home with full force as he ascends further into the atmosphere than intended. Although we know how First Man ends this is a glimpse at how the turbulent journey started. The fervour surrounding space travel, the moon landings and astronauts is one of an idealistic heroism but here, Chazelle’s opening brings home the idea that the group of highly intelligent engineers who ascended into space were far more...

Expanding his short film, writer, director and actor Jim Cummings plays Jim, a cop who has a meltdown while trying to give a eulogy at his mother’s funeral. From there, he struggles to hold things together in his job and in his personal life, as he tries to bond with his daughter and fight his ex-wife’s request for sole custody. Right from the start, Thunder Road throws you with its tone. We first find a clearly distraught Jim stumbling through...