Film Reviews
For Sama
Thursday, May 21st, 2020 Film Reviews,“We never thought the world would let this happen,” says Waad Al-Kateab, early into For Sama, a documentary she has co-directed with Edward Watts. Working as an independent journalist, Waad recorded the progress of the Syrian civil war in the city of Aleppo as the euphoria of rebellion gave way to mounting despair. The film […]
Hollywood
Friday, May 15th, 2020 Film Reviews,Hollywood. The title says it all: big, brassy, and full of false promises. Although generations of movie-makers have felt compelled to pore over the industry’s dirty secrets there’s never been anything quite like the new Netflix series by Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy. Please don’t take that as an endorsement. A typical Hollywood saga is […]
Colour Out of Space
Thursday, May 7th, 2020 Film Reviews,H.P. Lovecraft is the undisputed Old Master of American horror fiction. Although he died of cancer at the age of 47 in 1937, Lovecraft’s output was positively volcanic. The fantastic tales have made him posthumously famous, but he also wrote reams of poetry, and countless essays on science, philosophy, political and social issues. He ghost-wrote […]
Unorthodox
Thursday, April 30th, 2020 Film Reviews,Now that everyone lives in a closed community it may be the ideal time to look at a Netflix series set in the hermetic world of the Hasidic Jews. Unorthodox takes us into the lives of the Satmars, a group founded in Hungary in 1905 by a visionary Rabbi who escaped the Holocaust and brought […]
The Plot Against America
Thursday, April 23rd, 2020 Film Reviews,History is one long game of ‘What if?’ ‘What if Germany had been victorious in the Second World War?’ Philip K. Dick gave us a fictional answer in The Man in the High Castle, which was made into a successful TV series. In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth explored another historical […]
Vivarium
Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 Film Reviews,This may not be the best time to release a feature about a couple trapped in a suburban nightmare, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Are we eager to stream a film that reminds us of our own predicament? Perhaps there’s a vicarious pleasure in watching others doing it harder than oneself. Vivarium […]
Uplifting for Easter
Friday, April 10th, 2020 Film Reviews,Stranded at home for days and weeks on end, the inevitable question arises: “What should I watch?” This is a conundrum with the potential for major domestic unrest. In trying to come up with suitably ‘uplifting’ titles for hermits I’m having to face the brutal realisation that everyone likes totally different stuff. Tell your families […]
100 Years Ago: Way Down East
Thursday, April 2nd, 2020 Film Reviews,Few movies have been more rapturously received than D.W.Griffith’s Way Down East. For the Boston Post it became the subject of a heavily italicised editorial on 21 September, 1920: “This remarkable film should be seen by everyone; it is clean, sweet and beautiful; enlivened by humour and thrilling beyond description. When this art reaches so […]
Epidemic entertainment
Thursday, March 26th, 2020 Film Reviews,If there were a stockmarket for movies the smart money would be on Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), which has become one of the most searched and downloaded titles on the web, even though it’s not available on Netflix or most of the other the major streaming services. With the news cycle so completely dominated by […]
The Personal History of David Copperfield
Wednesday, March 18th, 2020 Film Reviews,One wonders what Charles Dickens would have made of Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield? Despite his reputation as a champion of the poor and downtrodden, the famous novelist shared all the popular racial prejudices of his time. No-one disputes that the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, is a notorious […]