Film Reviews

By Wyndham Hacket Pain It may seem unfair to compare every new racing documentary to Asif Kapadia’s Senna, but since its 2011 release there have been a number of films that have covered the sport. Rush, Lauda: The Untold Story, 1, and Senna vs Brundle have all to a certain degree tried to recapture both the heart-pounding thrills and emotion of Kapadia’s film. The latest Formula One documentary Williams does cover a similar subject area but instead focuses on a...

By Michael McNulty Gareth Tunley’s debut feature, The Ghoul, is a brooding, atmospheric psychological thriller. Blending a dreamlike, occult narrative with suburban noir, Tunely, a Ben Wheatley regular, has made a film that feels part Kill List, with a smattering of Taxi Driver and a Lynch-ian twist. Chris (Tom Meeten), a homicide detective, is called down to London to investigate a mysterious double murder. The two killed are said, by forensic experts, to have continued to approach their killer after...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain  Maud Lewis remains one of Canada’s best known folk artists. Despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis that restricted her movement she still managed to produce her much loved paintings. At one point her fame grew to the extent that she was featured in magazines and on television, and even sold a painting to the then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Maudie opens in provincial Nova Scotia during the 1930s, where Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) is frustrated at the lack of...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain  Stories about the Second World War are so ingrained in our minds and daily practice that it can seem as if there is nothing to add to the discourse of this period. As a result, it is always a pleasure for a story to separate itself from the pantheon of films, books, and tales that have tried to cover the period before and perhaps even more exciting when someone tries to challenge the preconceptions we have about...

Dunkirk is almost a silent film. Dunkirk is a film that is a master class in the art of ‘show it, don’t say it’. Dunkirk, demands that you feel like you are on the front line with the soldiers. The audience is used as another stranded Tommy on the beach, forming an orderly queue, waiting to be rescued. Dunkirk is an unapologetically British film. There isn’t an ancillary, and unnecessary, tale of love and romance to "cheer up", and degrade...

A group of shady individuals accumulate in an abandoned Boston warehouse to size up and complete an arms deal. However, when some bad blood infiltrates the proceedings, the deal swiftly falls south, and the guns which were going to be used for other nefarious purposes are now being utilised a little earlier than expected. That’s it. Looking for anything else? You’re in the wrong place. Free Fire isn’t a film of complexity. There’s not that much to it. But there’s...

Those who have been charmed by the wily confidence of George Blagden’s libidinous King Louis XIV in Versailles may find themselves taken aback by Jean-Pierre Léaud’s frail and reclusive incarnation of the Sun King, whom we are introduced to at the start of The Death of Louis XIV: Albert Serra’s solemn chronicle of the monarch’s final days. The palace of Versailles is no longer the buzzing hive of royal intrigue it once was, but an eerily quiet fortress from where...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP David Lynch is one of film’s most striking and unique directors. In the 40 years since his debut feature Eraserhead he has created some of the most singular works in modern American film. It is therefore a real challenge for a documentary about such a figure to live up to the person they are trying to depict. It is a pleasure then to say that David Lynch: The Art Life, the latest documentary about him, tries...

By Anna Power An intergenerational female friendship flick with some nice ideas at its core but like so many others panders to schmaltz in its execution, though not unenjoyably so. Octogenarian Harriet Lauler (Shirley MacLaine) lives a loveless life. Her days roll on relentlessly; her pristine home a prison of sorts and you get a disturbing sense of the vacuum around her routine of lonely meals and frustrated gazing out the window over lengthy lawns at life. Filling the void...