The best films of 2020, so far … Uncut Gems (Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie) Energetic and rowdy, the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems is their most exciting film to date, boasting a Shakespearian performance from Adam Sandler as the … Continue reading The Best Films of 2020 (So Far)
Like so many deserving classics of the 1980s, Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) is a film that ought to be watched more than once, with each viewing yielding more detail, insight and colour. Of course, this is not true of … Continue reading Notes on Paris, Texas: Revisiting my favourite film
In retrospect, the audience of the 76th Venice Film Festival was far too comfortable amid the selection: Hirokazu Koreda’s latest picture, The Truth (2019), and Todd Phillip’s Joker (2019) hardly compromised their afternoons. Václav Marhoul’s third feature, The Painted Bird … Continue reading The Painted Bird // Review
Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller) Composed out of unseen, 70mm archive footage, the experience of the 1969 moon landing is triumphantly restaged by documentarian Todd Miller. It is one of the most spectacular films of the year, a highly … Continue reading Top 15 Films of 2019 Originally Published in Print February 2020
Many of my generation went through the most significant developmental phase of our lives over the last decade, and many of us were influenced by cinema and the stories it showed to us. Maybe we fell in love (I did, … Continue reading Formative Films of the Decade Originally Published in Print February 2019
●●●●● “Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye,” offers Philip Glass, writing in his memoir Words Without Music. Taking place over a week and a half, the love story … Continue reading Portrait of a Lady on Fire // Review One of the most beautiful films you will see this year
Top 10 Worst Films of 2019 The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh, 2019) Indie-veteran Steven Soderbergh directs and produces this light-weight pastiche of Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2016), a facile, amateur project that fails to live up to its star ensemble … Continue reading The Top 10 Worst Films of 2019
●●○○○ “For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer,” reads a minister, solemnly, at the closed-casket funeral of Reginald Davis, a former NYPD officer. His young son, Andre (Christian Isaiah), … Continue reading 21 Bridges // Review an overboiled, Scooby-Doo cliché
Nicholas Winding Refn is a precious filmmaker – look too hard and you might puncture the surface; look too carefully and the weight of his images could ring hollow. Few contemporary auteurs have gorged audiences so fully with their own … Continue reading byNWR – a delicious streaming platform of unholy cinema Originally Published in Print November 2019
Cinema has always been a playground for love affairs, whether fulfilled or frustrated. It is easy to fall in love with the movies, but easier still to watch others do exactly that. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the act … Continue reading Modern Love: Falling in Love in 21st Century Cinema
●●●● ‘La Belle Époque’ (translated from French as “the beautiful epoch” or “the good times”) is a period in European history, dated approximately from 1871 to 1941, and typically characterised by its renewed sense of peace, wealth and optimism. It … Continue reading La Belle Époque // Review Rekindling the good times of marriage
●●●●● Somewhere, in a remote, unnamed location marked only “Wilderness Trail”, two young men both named Gerry wander across a desert and get lost, unable to recover their way in the vast, minimalist infinite of their landscape. Not unlike … Continue reading Gerry (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2002) // Re-view