Film Reviews

It is easy to get caught up in the annual awards coverage and forget that entries are films, and not just news stories. Articles surrounding Hidden Figures have placed a large emphasis on its diverse cast and how it is somehow an antidote to the failings of last year’s nominations. All this attention seems rather unfair, as it ignores the merits and qualities that are on display in this film. Set in 1960s Virginia, where racism and sexism were generally...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain With a McDonald’s seemingly in every town centre and motorway service centre in the world it’s hard to imagine a time before the fast-food chain. Whether in the small island of Réunion off Madagascar or the Negev Desert in Israel you know the familiar burger and fries is never too far away. Over the last 60 years, McDonald’s has not just become one the world’s most recognisable and ironic products, but has also come to feed...

In Prevenge, Alice Lowe revisits the familiar grisly kill territory of Ben Wheatley’s brilliantly understated film Sightseers, which she co-wrote and starred in alongside Steve Oram. Directed, written and starring Lowe herself in the principle role, Prevenge is a hilarious black comedy charting the adventures of a heavily pregnant woman on a remorseless killing spree. Despite lacking the perfectionist skills of Laurie Rose’s exquisite cinematography, the film has a similar narrative tone to Sightseers and deals with similar themes of...

Set in Pittsburg in the 1950s and adapted from August Wilson’s 1983 award-winning play of the same name, Fences is the third feature from Denzel Washington in his directorial guise. The play was part of a bigger body of work titled The Pittsburgh Cycle which charters black lives across the decades of the 20th century. The film has been one the most long awaited projects of the last 30 years. After winning the Pulitzer prize in 1987, the play was...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP It must be hard enough to write, direct, and star in a film at the best of times, so I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Alice Lowe to do all these things while heavily pregnant. Prevenge has a simple but interesting premise. Ruth, a pregnant women, is convinced her unborn child is not only speaking to her, but requesting her to commit a string of murders. In between these episodes there...

20th Century Women sees the return of Beginners (2010) director Mike Mills in one of the most ambitiously stylish and quirky pieces of filmmaking of recent years. Being no stranger to technical wizardry from his years in the music video industry, Mills offers his audience an exhilarating mishmash of authentic 1970s nostalgia mixed with dream-like sequences and real-life footage, with a killer soundtrack to boot. Set in California during the summer of 1979, 20th Century Women charters some era-defining moments...

By Linda Marric Produced by Hollywood’s own “enfant terrible” of cinema Shia LaBeouf, LoveTrue is the highly anticipated second non-fiction feature by Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el. Israeli born Har’el, whose roots lie first and foremost in music videos and art installations, explores the broad idea of human love using an atmospheric mixture of present footage as well as imagined pasts and futures. The film is also a poetic piece which uses artful camerawork and reenacted sequences to tell touching...

By Linda Marric  @linda_marric After 25 years spent as a camerawoman on various award winning documentary features, Kirsten Johnson amassed hours upon hours of outtakes and candid moments from her trips to Bosnia, Kabul and Darfur, to name but a few places. Born out of this was a truly unique piece of filmmaking. In Cameraperson Johnson offers an authentic look at some of the most touching as well as some of the most harrowing accounts witnessed by men, women and...

By Linda Marric When Breitbart, a pro-Trump alt-right news website, posted a story about how a mob of Muslim men chanting “Allah Akbar” had vandalised a German church on New Year’s Eve, the story was shared thousands of times across social media platforms before finally being debunked by German police a few days later. In a year that saw “post-truth” nominated as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, it remains important to recognise how damaging even the smallest a...