Wadjda (London Film Festival review)
Delightful and powerfully satisfying, an arthouse crowd-pleaser about a charmingly irrepressible protagonist… (new DVD/VOD UK)
female protagonist
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World movie review: deep impact
The heightened emotions and outrageous urgency of rom-coms are actually appropriate here. All the absurdities that define the genre — not accidentally but deliberately — suddenly work in its favor.
Safe movie review: New York noir
A viciously cynical dark fantasy that fashions a new mythos of post-9/11 New York, a bleak but plausible world of the Russian mob, the Chinese Triads, and the NYPD as another gang vying for supremacy.
The Cabin in the Woods movie review: the end of horror
I don’t know how anyone can possibly make a horror movie again. This absolutely genius movie renders all past and future examples of the genre superfluous.
Martha Marcy May Marlene movie review: occupy victimhood
It takes an extraordinary film to turn the notion of woman-as-victim on its head… and an even more extraordinary film if it does posit as its central conceit that its protagonist has unquestionably been victimized.
Monsters movie review
“Sunny with a chance of creatures” could well be the weather report from this world, one not too far removed from our own, in one of the most startling movies of our new DIY filmmaking culture.
Agora movie review: condemned to repeat it
Once upon a time, a film this epic, this relevant, this emotional would have been celebrated as a great entertainment and important storytelling with something vital to say about the world today.
Never Let Me Go movie review: ordinary people
I’ve come to realize recently that there’s something more chilling, more eerie than a fictional dystopian world: a fictional dystopian world in which no one understands they’re living in a dystopia.
The Runaways (review)
There hasn’t been a movie like The Runaways, one about women rockers that’s just as raw and earthy and tough and pitiless as the ones about the men are.
Bright Star movie review: cinematic poetry
John Keats is the intruder in Fanny Brawne’s story, and you might be forgiven for assuming that she’s the one who became legendary, for how the film defies convention by lavishing its focus on her.
