Film Reviews

There are three things that King of Thieves has to figure out before it’s getting a tan in Margate: First, you’ve got a story that most people watching already know the basic facts to, the 2015 Hatton Gardens robbery. An audience knowing the resolutions can sap the drama if you’re not being alert (also not helped by the existence of a previous film about this, 2017's The Hatton Garden Job). Second, the moment the event happened every man and his dog was saying it should...

“This movie is not an autobiography, but a fictional dramatization based on true characters and real events.  Facts and fiction have been mixed.  Scenes, dialogues, emotions, and thoughts of the characters reflect the maker’s imagination and should not be confused with reality.”  So begins Koen Mortier’s latest feature, Angel. Err…excuse me?   This is the truly bizarre start to a film that slips and stumbles its way through its 104-minute runtime.  Koen Mortier, who wrote the script based on the Dimitri...

The title of actress Tuva Novotny’s film alludes to something you can’t see coming, and that’s what happens both to the characters and the audience in this emotionally intense real-time drama. Things start slowly, with 12 year old Tea (Nora Mathea Øien) and her friend Anna (Ellen Heyerdahl Janzon) walking home from handball practice. Along the way they talk about small things; homework, an upcoming exam, girls in their class who wear too much makeup. We’re settling in, we assume,...

From the beginning of American Animals, which opens to the sound of bird song and a quote from Charles Darwin, it is clear that it is interested in weightier themes than the average crime thriller. The film takes place in 2003 and is set in Lexington, Kentucky, where Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan) is an art student. At the University of Transylvania, where Spencer studies, there are a collection of rare books in their library worth an estimated $12 million. He mentions it in passing to his friend Warren Lipka (Evan...

Directed by Corin Hardy, the new instalment in what is now being referred to as the “Conjuring Universe" is a rather stale and scare-free affair that’s only just slightly rescued by its female lead’s incredible screen presence, and remarkable performance. Written by Gary Dauberman (It, Annabelle) from a story by James Wan, The Nun offers more of the same old tropes and hackneyed ideas we’ve come to expected from this hugely lucrative and admittedly very popular franchise, but in the end the film fails to bring anything new to...

Over the past couple of years there has been a growing conversation about representation in film. The Miseducation of Cameron Post isn’t the first coming of age film about an LGBT teen (indeed, it’s enough of a subgenre to have its own established cliches), nor is it the first of those to deal with ‘conversion therapy’ (1999’s But I’m A Cheerleader, also directed by a queer woman, looks at a similar situation with a more comedic eye). It is, however,...

Kicking off this year’s Venice International Film Critics’ Week is Indian fantasy-horror Tumbbad. From the go, it quickly becomes apparent that Tumbbad is on course to serve as a parable for the corrupting nature of greed.  Narration tells us, as we sweep over the bleak, rain-sodden countryside of Tumbadd in the far reaches of western India, the legend of Hastar, a God undone by his own his avarice. Rahi Anil Barve and co-director Adesh Prasad have crafted a film with the ambitions...

Hermann Vaske attempts to tackle why we are creative in his newest documentary of the same name. Beneath the thin veneer this documentary, helmed by a director who believes he has cast off into the waters of the great thinkers in his pursuit of a single truth to an unanswerable question, is a film clearly dreamt up by advertising exec.  Slick, stylised, but ultimately lacking in imaginative energy, it is the kind of “creative content,” that has been perfected by marketers,...

For my money, one of the major new cinematic talents discovered in recent years was not an actor, a director or a screenwriter but 37-year-old cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who was camera operator on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Zal stepped in as DP just after just a few days when Ryszard Lenczewski left the film. It could have been said that Lenczewski laid the foundation for that gorgeous film but with this, his second collaboration with Pawlikowski, I think a solid argument...