Film Reviews

By Linda Marric Produced by Hollywood’s own “enfant terrible” of cinema Shia LaBeouf, LoveTrue is the highly anticipated second non-fiction feature by Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el. Israeli born Har’el, whose roots lie first and foremost in music videos and art installations, explores the broad idea of human love using an atmospheric mixture of present footage as well as imagined pasts and futures. The film is also a poetic piece which uses artful camerawork and reenacted sequences to tell touching...

By Linda Marric  @linda_marric After 25 years spent as a camerawoman on various award winning documentary features, Kirsten Johnson amassed hours upon hours of outtakes and candid moments from her trips to Bosnia, Kabul and Darfur, to name but a few places. Born out of this was a truly unique piece of filmmaking. In Cameraperson Johnson offers an authentic look at some of the most touching as well as some of the most harrowing accounts witnessed by men, women and...

By Linda Marric When Breitbart, a pro-Trump alt-right news website, posted a story about how a mob of Muslim men chanting “Allah Akbar” had vandalised a German church on New Year’s Eve, the story was shared thousands of times across social media platforms before finally being debunked by German police a few days later. In a year that saw “post-truth” nominated as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, it remains important to recognise how damaging even the smallest a...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP Those of us who spent our childhoods and adolescence partaking in school plays will understand how formative it can be to stand on stage and pretend to be someone else. I for one can remember the confidence I took from playing a role that held little or no resemblance to myself. Sometimes it is only under the guise and identity of someone else that we are truly able to learn about ourselves. Toni Erdmann, which plays...

By Anna Power  @powerpops If you were expecting a glossy biopic of Jackie Kennedy, wife of JFK, first lady and international fashion icon, think again, Pablo Larrain’s film is anything but. It plays more like an up-close and personal examination of a woman in trauma. It’s brutal, jarring and uncomfortable viewing at times. The narrative centers upon Jackie’s (Natalie Portman) interview with Life Magazine’s Theodore H White (Billy Crudup), a week to the day,  after JFK’s assassination. Using grainy 16mm...

By Anna Power @powerpops An extraordinary story, Lion will lock your heart in a vice and squeeze it till all the tears come out and do so without pandering to melodrama. Based on the heartbreaking true story of five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar), who having pestered his teenage brother Guddu (Priyanka Bose) to let him go with him to look for night work - both boys work to assist their single mother and help feed the family, on this...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel To the uninitiated, the world Todd Solondz has set out over the course of eight features must appear a baffling one. It’s likely to be just as confusing to those who have stumbled across work stretching back nearly three decades. Wiener-Dog continues his merging of bone-dry humour and startlingly underplayed drama resulting in an anthology piece of varying success. The one constant across four stories is the wiener dog of the title, a passive observer thrown...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric In light of the praise bestowed upon director Damien Chazelle and his cast at this year’s Golden Globes, some might feel that other more “worthy” productions might have been more deserving of the accolades. This is precisely why one should come out in defence of La La Land and its enchanting, unabashed tribute to the old MGM musicals. Starring two of the most loved and respected actor of the moment, La La Land is a disarmingly...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester By The Sea is a beautifully crafted powerful story which centres around themes of loss, frayed human relations, and more importantly the persistence of grief and how people deal with loss in different ways. Lonergan is well versed on things of this nature, given his critically acclaimed debut featureYou Can Count On Me which dealt with similar subjects. Casey Affleck is Lee, a withdrawn hard-working Boston handyman whose world...