Film Reviews

Described as a 'fairy tale for adults', Michael Pearce's debut feature film is able to capture his home island of Jersey with a brilliant yet terrifying blend of natural beauty and chilling sub-urbanity. The story at the core of Beast is deliberately simple: in a suffocating family atmosphere, a young woman named Moll (Jessie Buckley) is drawn to rough outsider Pascal (Johnny Flynn). All the while a serial killer is on the loose on the island. The construct of Beast...

A solitary figure dressed in fatigues hunches over a dusty patch of ground. He scratches away at the earth and pulls from it a pot flecked with gritty, dried soil. As he adjusts to stand straight, there is a marked stiffness in his right leg and a curious crease in the thigh of his trousers. A blue wire attached to a small pack dangles from the pot. A quick snip from a pair of pliers and the man turns to...

Warning: Though this review is spoiler free, the film’s set-up is referenced throughout. “It’s not overselling it to say that the future of the universe is at stake,” declares Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange with a solemn tone. He’s referring, of course, to the coming of Thanos (Josh Brolin), a galactic warlord with an unhealthy violet complexion, towering height and intimidatingly chunky chin, who supposedly wishes to bring balance to the universe by destroying half of it. The Sorcerer Supreme, however,...

The term ‘British comedy’ is not one to often conjure much hope and a genre known really for more misses than hits (for me), the latest British comedy to attempt to achieve success is the rather damp squib that is You, Me and Him. Starring actors that have been known to be excellent in other roles, admittedly on the small screen, including Lucy Punch, David Tennant and Game of Thrones alum, Faye Marsay, expectations for this tale of unexpected pregnancy...

The nuanced ambition of Kathleen Hepburn’s 2017 TIFF entry and debut feature, Never Steady, Never Still, based on her short film of the same name, is soaked in the melancholy of quiet suffering. The film takes inspiration from Hepburn’s close personal experience with Parkinson’s disease, the director’s mother having suffered from it for the last 24 years. Centring on an Alberta based family of three, Judy (Shirley Henderson), mother to son Jamie (Théodore Pellerin), and wife to devoted husband Ed...

It is amusing to imagine if French director Claire Denis watches many of the American romantic comedies that we know all too well. Whether she does or not, her latest film, Let The Sunshine In, is a clever antidote to the clichés and indulgences that have come to define the genre. The ever reliable Juliette Binoche stars as Isabelle, a divorced artist who is looking for true love for the first time. Her performance is full of nuance and an...

French drama Custody (original title Jusqu'à la garde) opens with mother Miriam (Léa Drucker) and father Antoine (Denis Ménochet) arguing over Antoine's rights to see his two children. Initially there is a level of sympathy for Antoine, and an audience can question whether he is being unfairly maligned by a seemingly dislikable mother. I was also reminded of the issues of tit for tat arguments in a family court between parents, with what is the truth being a matter of...

In the couple years since Steven Spielberg professed that the western was dead, we have seen a mini revival in the genre. Whether it is The Hateful Eight, Hell or High Water, or even The Revenant a new generation of filmmakers have connected with this type of film. German director Valeska Grisebach is the latest to reimagine the genre with her third feature. Western is set in a remote rural town in Bulgaria, near the Greek boarder. There, German workers...

Sergey Loznitsa’s latest offering, A Gentle Creature, is an exercise in suffering. A gruelling odyssey that delves the depths of the human spirit, that by the film’s end leaves you coming up gasping for air. Derived from the title of a Dostoevsky short story, Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature, which competed at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for the much coveted Palme d’Or award, is imbued with the deep pain and suffering of the Russian people. Whilst the narrative of the...