Some may find the sweeping chilliness of Francis Lee’s sophomore feature too bleak, but consider this critic’s cockles warmed. Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet are devastatingly brilliant in Ammonite, forming an unlikely romance between a sickly young wife and a respected paleontologist. Though most take a little warming up to their craft, Francis Lee’s directorial […]Read More
Thirty-six years after Stop Making Sense set the bar stratospherically high for the concert film, an unlikely duo has created an urgently joyous match. Spike Lee and David Byrne’s new venture combines the rapturous joy of Byrne’s music with Lee’s trademark style of confronting us with contemporary truths. The result is nothing short of wondrous. […]Read More
Erica Riva plays a traumatised woman drowning in the sound of her own nightmares in this De Palma-esque thriller. The Intruder is an unnerving Argentine thriller from Natalia Meta, that sets out to explore how PTSD can manifest itself in the wake of horrific events. Erica Riva plays Inès, a fortysomething woman who relies on […]Read More
Supernova is an elegant, elegiac story of two soulmates facing the cruelty of dementia, with director Harry Macqueen crafting a mature, affecting story of galactic proportions. Every star in the night sky looks the same to me—glinting uniformly in the inky darkness, unthreatening in their anonymity. Would I find the night sky less beautiful if […]Read More
When Humphrey Bogart says “We’ll always have Paris” to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, he probably didn’t anticipate a deadly global pandemic that would prevent most travel and seriously test his romantic logic. With the majority of holidays cancelled, including my own holiday to Paris I was meant to go on back in June, we just […]Read More
At a lower-key Venice Film Festival than normal thanks to the COVID crisis, Chloé Zhao Nomadland has picked up the Golden Lion award. Having received rave reviews since its premiere in Venice and subsequently after its screening in Toronto, Nomadland stars Frances McDormand as a woman grappling with a newfound transient life on the road […]Read More
Years after leaving school, I still find myself being deferential to the scholastic calendar. I wake up on 1 September and expect there to be a path of autumnal leaves ceremoniously leading out of my bedroom, signalling in the season of woolly jumpers and new WHSmith stationery. It does feel weird, now deep into my […]Read More
The full line-up has been revealed for this year’s BFI London Film Festival, which will be fully virtual for the first time. The BFI London Film Festival will open with Steve McQueen’s “rousing tale of Black solidarity and resistance,” Mangrove, starring Letitia Wright, Shaun Parkes and Malachi Kirby. Also previously announced was Francis Lee’s Ammonite, […]Read More
“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” This is a proverb quoted early on in Charlie Kaufman’s arresting and poignant new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which spends most of its time under a flurry of snowfall. We’re not quite sure what the sin is. All we know […]Read More
With eight films, six Academy Award nominations, a three-letter moniker and legions of adoring fans to his name, Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most renowned living filmmakers in the world. Aged just 50, his eight features have pretty much all received critical acclaim. But despite always being the bridesmaid and never the bride […]Read More
The three most-liked reviews of Captives on the film social network Letterboxd are pretty similar in their brazen horniness for Tim Roth. “this was absolute garbage but i want tim roth to spit in my mouth” reads the first. “MY BODY IS LITERALLY A HOLE FOR TIM ROTH I WANT HIM TO CHOKE ME!” reads […]Read More
Dead Sexy: A Fortnightly Column on Erotic Thrillers Just like its ornithological counterpart The Goldfinch, Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow was a film pronounced dead on arrival. I didn’t have Letterboxd when Red Sparrow was released, nor was I yet au fait with the beast that is ‘film twitter’. I watched it at an empty screening […]Read More
The British film industry suffered a blow today with the news Sir Alan Parker’s passing at the age of 76 after a lengthy illness. Parker was born in Islington, North London to Elsie, a dressmaker, and William, a house painter. He started his career in the late 1960’s directing TV commercials before going on to […]Read More
Some people need absolute silence to be at peace or to work. Others opt for lo-fi beats, classical piano or white noise to help tune their wandering brains. Lately, however, I’ve discovered a section of YouTube that allows me to feel cosy, nostalgic and peaceful, filling dead silences with tingling ASMR noises and relaxing ambient […]Read More
Caitlin Moran’s outdated feminism of ‘big knickers and girl power’ falls flat in this rags-to-riches-and-back-again adaptation Like many, I was over the moon at the news that one of my favourite teenage novels, Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl, was to be adapted into a film with the luminous Beanie Feldstein in the starring […]Read More
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