Film Reviews

Marc J. Francis and Max Pugh’s documentary, Walk with Me, sets itself up as if it were to be an exploration of a truly interesting character. A title card introduces Thich Nhát Hanh, an exiled Zen Buddhist Monk from Vietnam, who, having relocated to France, has established the Plum Village Monastery. Instead, the film meanders through a slice of life portraiture of monastic living, while failing to offer the audience anything that feels particularly engaging or insightful. The footage, collected...

You can almost hear the faint chorus of “America, fuck yeah!” in the background of Steven Quale’s Bosnia-set, Navy SEALs action-adventure romp. Penned (in part) by Luc Besson, Renegades is a mash-up of Team America and Three Kings without any of the cynicism or irony, and played with the same straight faced, “America the Great” determination of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. A hardened group of all-American frogmen in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War, learn from a local barmaid, Lara (Sylvia...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, refugees and migration have been popular topics with filmmakers in recent years. Indeed, over the last 12 months there have been a number of excellent projects, notably The Other Side of Hope and Human Flow, which have reflected upon the struggles and experiences of migrant travellers. With Jupiter’s Moon, Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó creatively attempts to add to this discourse. The film opens on the border between Serbia and Hungry, where a number of Syrian refugees are trying...

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has never been particularly interested in fact or historical accuracy, and even though he often builds stories around real life figures, they frequently have little in common with those at the heart of the source material. He has previously turned Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg from a goofy university drop out into a spiteful and almost sociopathic character, with fans of the film even accepting Zuckerberg’s claims that Sorkin made a lot of it up. With Molly’s Game...

By Simon Columb  Mean, affected by a tragic condition and with a haunting, arresting gaze, Ava is a memorable tale. Directed by Léa Mysius, this debut can meander and lose a little energy, with plot devices dropped by the way side early on, but it has an intriguing focal point in its lead protagonist who is keen to escape her middle-class, yet lonely life. Ava is also a vulnerable and broken 13-year old girl. Bravely portrayed by newcomer Noée Abita...

Towards the end of Pitch Perfect 3, Brittany Snow’s Chloe declares to her fellow Bellas – without even the vaguest hint of irony – that it’s time for them all to start new chapters and move on with their lives; a conclusion many members of the audience are likely to have already come to some 60-70 minutes earlier. For even if you consider yourself to be a hardcore fan of the Pitch Perfect franchise – and as someone who could...

Warning: Though this review is spoiler free, the film’s set-up is referenced throughout. “Good guys, bad guys, these are all just words,” says Benicio Del Toro’s inscrutable space-hacker DJ about a third of the way through The Last Jedi; his own allegiances, tellingly, enigmatically blurred between the dark and the light. The Star Wars saga means so many things to so many people, but its narrative and thematic crux has ostensibly been the same since George Lucas first introduced us...

Bingo: The King of the Mornings is directed by the Oscar-nominated editor, Daniel Rezende, who worked on Meirelles’s City of God and Bingo is his directorial debut and Brazil’s official Academy Awards entry for best foreign film. It is ultimately a redemption drama, based on the true story of the former porn actor Arlindo Barreto, who in the 80s was a huge hit throughout Brazil playing the character of “Bozo”, a clown on Saturday morning children’s TV. Barreto played “Bozo”...

When you visit a museum that occupies the fields of science or natural history there is often a screening room playing a documentary about the state of the world or showcasing one of the wonders of the world. It is these films that Mountain a documentary, funnily enough, about mountains from Australian film-maker Jennifer Peedom reminded me of. There are some truly stunning images captured by Peedom in Mountain as her camera swoops and soars over the highest peaks in...