Film Reviews

The Guilty A few years ago, I said that the acclaimed Locke was essentially radio. Set entirely in a car, with its protagonist having telephone conversations as he drives on into the night, it struck me as something that, whatever its other qualities, imparted nothing extra to us by being presented in a visual format. The Guilty is set entirely in an emergency call centre as Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), bored by being tied to a desk job, is finally...

1937. 1954. 1976. 2018. A Star Is Born has had a version for almost every generation of cinema, and the pull of its story can travel across eras with ease. In Bradley Cooper's latest version, he takes the '76 approach of transferring the story to purely music: self-destructive star Jackson Maine (Cooper) stumbles into a back street bar one day in search of more booze. There he comes across a performer in Ally (Lady Gaga) that fascinates him, and one he wants...

True crime is big business at the moment. Documentaries like Making a Murderer, Casting Jonbenet and The Staircase and podcasts like Sword and Scale, Generation Why and Casefile generate large audiences and discussion. There are though certain crimes that transcend the regular true crime audience and pass into the wider pop culture consciousness. The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden, allegedly by Andrew’s daughter Lizzie, is one of those crimes. Since her trial ended in acquittal in 1892 there have...

Set in the town of Salem, Assassination Nation is a dystopian fantasy about the consequences for four high school girls when their town goes into meltdown, after half of its residents have their text messages and emails hacked and released on to the internet. Because everything is terrible now, we don’t have to look far into fantasy for our dystopian nightmares. The hacking a few years ago of private celebrity photos and the monitoring of prominent people’s phone messages by,...

Bisbee ‘17Reality, in any sense wider than the confines of the frame, is something cinema can never truly capture. Even in the purest of non-fiction films, there is a starting and stopping point and the question of how the very presence of a camera alters the reality it observes. Robert Greene is a documentarian who isn’t particularly interested in the purity of reality, rather, with Kate Plays Christine and now with Bisbee ‘17, he likes to look at how replaying...

Having made her debut with stranger than fiction doc The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle appears to have almost literally stumbled on the genesis of her first fiction feature. She ran in to the all girl skateboarding crew Skate Kitchen on the New York subway and, fascinated by them, bought them coffee and began to hang out with them. This led initially to the short film That One Day and eventually to this film; a blend of fact and fiction with the...

In Björn Runge’s The Wife, Glenn Close offers a truly outstanding performance as the long suffering wife of an insufferably vain novelist (played by Jonathan Pryce). Adapted for the screen by Jane Anderson from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name, the film is a beautifully understated, thought provoking and deeply affecting study in codependency and deceit, which is only slightly let down by a needlessly stagey style. After nearly forty years of marriage, Joan and Joe Castleman (Close and Pryce) seem very happy...

Kate Novack has all the necessary ingredients for a fascinating study of one of the fashion world’s seminal players in her documentary, The Gospel According to André.  Sadly, however, Novack never quite manages to get under the skin of the films titular subject, and the end result leaves little food for thought. The Gospel According to André chronicles the rise of the larger than life, both in character and physical stature, fashion editor André Leon Talley from the segregated south to the fitting rooms and runways...

ShadowZhang Yimou’s three previous martial arts films have been explosions of both colour and action. Whatever else you thought of them, they were retina-searing spectacles of the highest order. Shadow sees Yimou returning to martial arts cinema, but with a very different aesthetic. The story manages to be simple yet convoluted, revolving round the town of Jing, which the kingdom of Pei also claims the right to. The King of Pei (Ryan Zheng) is outraged that his top military commander...