Film Reviews

George Nolfi’s tale of the ‘birth’ of Bruce Lee (Philip Ng), set in an evocative representation of 1960s San Francisco is at best an entertaining B-movie and at worst a straight to video bargain bin flick. The story focuses on a pre-legend Lee and his fight with Shaolin Master Wong Jack Man (Yu Xia), the account of which is heavily fictionalised, and although the East meets West showdown did actually occur, very few people were privy to it and the...

Not even a compelling central performance from Ruth Wilson is enough to save Clio Barnard’s rustic, social-realist melodrama, Dark River, from being the first major cinematic upset of the 2018 calendar. Having made such a huge impact with her first two films – bracing docu-hybrid, The Arbor, and her acutely poetic follow-up feature, The Selfish Giant – Barnard has now turned her attention away from the inner-city existence, and instead settled her focus on the Britain’s pastoral hinterland; following in...

Daniel Fitzsimmons’ debut feature is scuppered by an undercooked script and half-baked ideas that fail to ignite any real feeling in sci-fi psychological drama, Native. After a telepathic alien hive race discovers a strange musical transmission being emitted from a far off planet, two scientists, Cane (Rupert Graves) and Eva (Ellie Kendrick), are sent on a mission to uncover and colonize its source. Science-fiction struggles in a difficult balancing act of having to find that sweet spot between being an...

Warning: this review contains a possible spoiler The premise of Polish 'documentary' You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (original title: Nawet nie wiesz, jak bardzo cie kocham) is that an adult daughter Hanna (Hanna Maciąg) and mother Ewa (Ewa Szymczyk) are seeing renowned therapist Bogdan De Barbaro after growing apart since Ewa's divorce and increasingly distant behaviour hurt Hanna deeply. Visually the film is deliberately barren, alternating between close-ups of the trio in a windowless, colourless room. This...

Lady Bird is a film that deals with the trials and tribulations of first love, losing your virginity, and the final year of high school in a way that is rarely seen on the big screen. Each section of the film is given its own space to breathe, and although the film sticks to its tight 93 minute running time, no scene feels rushed. The film in fact should be commended for leaving you wanting more, for making you want...

In eyes of Guillermo del Toro, ‘monster’ is a relative term. So when Richard Jenkins’ Giles, our nominal narrator, tells us that The Shape of Water is a story “of love & loss, and the monster who tried to destroy it all,” it would be unwise to assume that the antagonist he refers to is the piscine humanoid at the heart of this otherworldly fable. The latest offering from del Toro’s beloved cabinet of curiosities, The Shape of Water is...

“Just because something works, doesn’t mean it cannot be improved,” we’re told early on in Ryan Coogler’s courageous new entry into the Marvel canon. Loyal fans who have stuck with the series since the first Iron Man will no doubt be relieved to hear that this exhilarating blockbuster yarn doesn’t deviate too far from the studio’s winning formula, but it is those whose voices are callously sidelined so often in such big-budget fare, and crucially given such definition here, who...

Based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, Pad Man is the biopic of Lakshmikant Chauhan (Akshay Kumar), the man who dreamt of manufacturing and distributing subsidized sanitary pads to the women of India after seeing the dirty rags his wife was using during menstruation. Due to the taboos surrounding menstruation in his small village and across India in general; it is not just economics, but social mores Lakshmi must do battle against. What may not seem at first cinematic material...

Where most stories concerning plucky underdogs either see them miraculously come out on top or heroically fail with credit and respect intact, The Mercy shows us a third outcome that is much more realistic and true to life. For more often than not our grand plans do not turn out as we may have hoped, and we are left fearing ridicule and failure. The desire to cover up our mistakes is a common one that has consumed us all at...