Film Review – Lola On Film

The Woman In Cabin 10

A film thematically sawed in half, as if penned by two entirely different minds, styles, and social politics, glued in the middle by Knightley’s determined performance, which, through sheer grit and star power, carries the Promethean fire of a promising Hitchcockian thriller (with mistaken identities & much to say on the filthy rich), to a…
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Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat

Grimonprez’s maverick doc is a complex wild ride tracking the 1961 CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first PM of the Democratic Republic of Congo, an inspired piecing-together of a painful historical trajectory through cleverly devised bebop shortcuts, using editing and source material as jazz improv, stunning its viewer with its bulls-eye accuracy. ★★★★★
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Nosferatu

Macabre and glamorous, perfectly shot, yet lacking in the original’s black humour, resorting to self-irony, instead, this fascinating story of death and desire slowly succumbs to becoming the very disease it depicts, mesmerised by its own beautiful, soulless emptiness, fully open to the seductive corruption it so masterfully and pedantically conveys. ★★★☆☆
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A Complete Unknown

Electrifying (pun intended), despite a few glitches in its finely threaded matrix, mostly in places where it tries too hard to be Dylanesque. Timothée Chalamet inhabits the legendary musician with elegance and ease, allowing for his own interpretation to be led by an intuitive understanding of the man, rather than mimicry or idolatry. ★★★★☆
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A Sacrifice

An adaptation of a Nicholas Hogg novel, darkly atmospheric, it kicks off verging on decent and thought-provoking, but quickly slips into a rushed set of simplified conclusions which undermine the backbone of a solid story tackling important themes — the danger of groupthink, eco-doomsday cults, and the siren spell of internet gurus. ★★☆☆☆
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Juror #2

An honest piece of filmmaking, in which Eastwood turns a beady eye on the inner workings of the US judicial system. It is a pity that in steadily manning this ship, the director stops short each time the actors arrive at a point of inner truth, pulling them back into the broader picture, pushing for…
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Joker: Folie à Deux

A failed musical courtroom melodrama, whose bloated agenda betrayed Joaquin Phoenix’s singular creation, a living entity of its own haunting the popular mythos — while fragments of this difficult, compelling tale lie strewn on the floor, as if in a bloody Gotham City crime scene, waiting for a forensic examination of its disemboweled narrative. ★☆☆☆☆
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Conclave

Playing out like a breathless thriller, its dry humour colouring its elegant script, with zany indie logic applied to an epic tale, and the contemporary spirit of actors refashioning (yet respecting) its ur-traditional setting, this is a fascinating and controversial watch, emphasising the uncertainty of faith over the finality of dogma. ★★★★★
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Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

A dented but delightful genre upgrade, steers the archetypal tale of undead bloodsuckers into comfortable Addams Family territory — then radicalises it with a daring Nietzschean twist. Beautifully shot, wrapped in nighttime neon, it’s a slightly misaligned tale, to be sure — yet also a clever, charming one. ★★★☆☆
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Freud’s Last Session

Freud and C.S. Lewis converse, at length, about the meaning of god in a godless world, in this elegant meditation on mortality — while WW2, and the end of the world, begin. Smooth and enjoyable as a gorgeous piece of chamber music, its stage roots and intellectualism visible and unapologetic, giving it core strength, and…
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Surveilled

Lukewarm doc nevertheless sees award-winning journalist Ronan Farrow hot on the trail of Pegasus, a commercial spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group, devised for government use against criminals and terrorists, yet also utilised to target activists, politicians, journalists, their families, or any ordinary citizen that ‘falls out of line’. ★★☆☆☆
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The Universal Theory

Writer/director Timm Kröger‘s brilliantly devised thriller is a feverish metaphysical noir, opaque, dreamlike, shot in exquisite monochrome, yet it fails in its pedestrian third act, leading us to a place where all its strange strands meet, and instead of ending in apt enigma — delivers an essay. Nevertheless, it still lingers in the mind, days…
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The acrobatics of the mise-en-scène are as diabolically fascinating as ever in the red dust of the post-Australian Wasteland. Yet, as dedicated as Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are in it, their delivery cannot compare with the depth of the Hardy/Theron combo. Still, I could not take my eyes off the screen. A power-ride with only one…
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Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

It seems strange and somehow entirely expected that not many people nowadays would have heard of Pallenberg, the spiritus movens of The Rolling Stones, the style icon, the counterculture queen. This doc aims to disrupt that state of affairs. Fascinating and classy, both tough-as-nails and tender — an exhilarating watch. ★★★★☆
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Priscilla

There was a void, endless and dark, in the comfort of Priscilla’s existence. As well as love, disturbingly abusive yet enduring. And Sofia Coppola nailed all that queasy glamour and somnambulic psychosexual malaise to a tee. Spaeny is alike a silent-era screen siren, conveying an incredible range of emotions, without words. ★★★★☆
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Back To Black

One crucial aspect of Amy Winehouse’s life Taylor-Johnson presented well is to make the central drama of her final years clearer to the audiences by elevating her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil to the position it actually had in her life. That, and Marisa Abela’s fierce performance, makes this heavily flawed biopic worthy of praise. ★★★☆☆
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La chimera

Poetic, mischievous, with magically potent inner logic, this story of a young British archeologist turned grave robber in 1980s Italy is a chimera in its own right, half fairytale, half heist, a hybrid consisting of parts that usually would not fit, but seem to exist together on screen, seamlessly, in a way only poetry is…
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Dune: Part Two

A triumph of style over substance, its sophisticated visuals barely managing to prop up a dialogue that seems to have been written on cocktail napkins. The sadomasochistic glee of the House Harkonnen appearing as an exercise in kinky fashion, their B/W world amplifying the feel of a Vogue spread dedicated to alternative lifestyles. ★☆☆☆☆
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Maestro

A prolonged fashion mag photoshoot, with a perfunctory script included — until its very end, when it decides to become an actual biopic of Lenny Bernstein, the celebrated American conductor and composer, yet far too late to make amends for the glossy tedium of the entire proceedings. A cocktail mix of the brilliant and the…
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Scoop

The juxtaposition of the pert and the painful is rarely pulled off without a sacrificing the heart of the story — which in the case of the BBC Newsnight’s interview with Prince Andrew are the underage girls sex-trafficked by Epstein. Yet, it shows a society tainted by injustice, stratified by status, then makes pleasures of…
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Anatomy Of A Fall

Justine Triet’s subversive Palme d’Or-winning psychological courtroom thriller is a proper postmodern 21st century mystery, ambivalent to its very core, leaving ample space for lingering suspicions and complex afterthoughts. It is also an all-around accomplished cinema, that, without much fanfare, draws us into its narrative space, effortlessly. ★★★★☆
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The Zone Of Interest

It is a significant risk to dedicate a decade of one’s life on a conceptual film on the diabolical mechanics of the Holocaust, in a rigorously detached frame, almost postcard-like — and allow that point to sink into the cortex of the viewer, via the agency of sound, denying any visual pleasure in the highly…
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Nyad

An earnest biopic on a fascinating character, played with great complexity by Annette Bening, a force of nature, employed in this story to full artistic capacity. It has an almost documentary feel to it, which, in a narrative film, could be a double-edged sword. Here, by being hindered in places by its own meticulousness in…
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Quo vadis, Aida?

Whoever lived in the chauvinist squalor that was the 1990s in the Balkans, a time when avenging ghosts and delusional violent men ravaged these lands, knows the truth when they see it. There may be many paths to it, as they are to the allegorical Rome in the title. But there is only one destination.…
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Crazy, Not Insane

If you ever had any interest in psychopathology outside the spectacle of media glamorisation and extensive exploitation, this is the doc you’ve been looking for. Devastating and fascinating, it suffers perhaps from visual and narrative fragmentation, but what it does do is depict human thirst for retribution. Society as executioner. ★★★★☆
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Napoleon

Who was it that said history was just one damn thing after another? This is what Scott’s epic feels like when not focused on the electrifying performance of Phoenix, as the diminutive great man himself, and his passionate, volatile relationship with wife (and ex-wife), Josephine, beautifully portrayed by an entirely miscast Kirby. ★★★☆☆
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Dalíland

Helmed by an otherwise highly inventive director, with its game cast left meandering in a film that should have been, at least, fun to watch, it is less than the sum of its parts, lacking a developed script and coherent directorial vision, dragging on to its inevitable demise, drowned in a patchwork of trivia. Dalíland…
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Guardians Of The Formula

Tracing the aftermath of a factual reactor incident at the Vinča Nuclear Institute, in 1958, Bjelogrlić treads the perilous tightrope between genre-generated sentiment and genuine emotion, arriving at an incredibly humane, candid story on the moralities of scientific experiment. A meditation on what courage, at its core, really is. ★★★★☆
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The Eternal Daughter

Exasperating, until it becomes heartbreaking — a cryptic Gothic tale with a twist that one can sense coming from the first minutes the film rolls. It’s the road that it takes to its inevitable conclusion that is the mystery. High-craft filmmaking, but lacking in openness of structure, allowing too little oxygen for audiences to inhale…
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Killers Of The Flower Moon

A sweeping mea culpa of the (Wild) West, and conspicuously lacking in any of the usual Hollywood glamourisations of the greed that built an Empire, Scorsese’s truly honourable and praiseworthy adaptation of Grann’s bestseller is also a study in why films should never be too respectful of any topic beyond the duty to their own…
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A Haunting In Venice

Based on Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, and accomplished that it is, this whirlwind spectacle comes out short in the one thing that matters most in a mystery – the story itself. Its psychological elements seem to be suffocated by their own locality, unable to gain any independence from the phantasmagorical scenery of Venice. ★★☆☆☆
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LOLA

This B&W retro sci-fi “found-footage” time-travel yarn is a stylish and perfectly formed cinematic coup — a genius archival mix of film stock in a witty Gen Z fantasy of saving-the-world, while elegantly sipping wine in chichi period clothes, in a fashionably derelict mansion, talking postmodern platitudes, until the darkness seeps in. ★★★★☆
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Stars At Noon

Denis’s latest is not the tour de force her breakthrough film was, yet it is made of the same elusive material, inhabiting a volatile liminal space, oozing sensual honesty, introducing a third entity conjured through relating, a presence which the filmmaker captures through her lens as few others can, with poetic precision and humanity. ★★★★☆
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Navalny

Its emphasis on impeccable style and photogenic chit-chat was certainly counter-productive to my previous sympathies, as I began to wonder if this Navalny was the same person who courageously, almost single-handedly, took on the Russian security state. A missed opportunity for creating compelling testimony about a dire situation. ★☆☆☆☆
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Tár

A profound and discombobulating meditation on the twin entities constituting the cult of fame — the star and its mirror image, the public, examining the corrosive power dynamic underlying the exchange of identity for mass attention, as well as separating art from the artist. An ancient schism currently manifesting as cancel culture. ★★★★★
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The Whale

All the weight of the story (metaphorically and literally) is carried by its tragic protagonist — the ailing Charlie, whom Fraser portrays with such depth, nuance, and wit. Nothing in the film matches this commitment, and that’s a problem. The prolonged gaze upon Charlie’s physicality further killing the point aimed to be conveyed. ★★★☆☆
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Everything Everywhere All At Once

Like a theme park ride you thought would be fantastic fun, then nausea and disorientation kick in, colours blur. EEAAO holds within a great idea, when one disentangles it from the hairball that is its narrative. In all its originality, it telegraphs its message, instead of allowing this intricately constructed ingenious world be the message.…
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The Banshees Of Inisherin

Captures the fragile state of being a human in one grand swoop of wit and weltschmerz. Its contours elegantly morose, its humour dark and bitter-sweet, its inhabitants erratic and gloriously eloquent, its landscape a mystery onto itself. The eponymous banshee, right on the money, carrying the mythical into the realms of the mundane. ★★★★★
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Triangle Of Sadness

The point where all good intentions in a story turn to dust is when the narrative stops respecting its characters, however vile they are. In Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winner, satire turns to caricature pretty quickly, offering an array of humans so painfully vapid, I started to root for these horrible people to be given at least…
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All The Beauty And The Bloodshed

Poitras and Goldin were made for each other. Both incredibly gutsy, and and uninterested in no-go zones, prone to slaying dragons of substantial calibre. But, despite Poitras being a powerful storyteller in her own right, this doc lives and breaths Goldin’s indefatigable spirit. The space Goldin gave to her own subjects, Poitras gives to Goldin.…
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Lynch/Oz

An impeccable essay film which reaches far beyond discussing fascinating aspects connecting the work of David Lynch to Victor Fleming‘s timeless wonder, Wizard Of Oz. Director Alexandre O. Philippe is turning out a virtuoso in translating cinematic sorcery into cultural code, firmly on the crossroads of zeitgeist and cinema. ★★★★★
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The Pale Blue Eye

Despite a labyrinth of narrative strands, it is Melling’s Poe that is at the heart of a story, which, at its dark centre, is equally about savage desperation as it is about blind desire. If it kept its early promise of a macabre deep dive into Poe’s literary universe, via an intricate murder mystery, this…
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Three Thousand Years Of Longing

An uneven, slightly unhinged piece of classic storytelling, featuring a gloriously deadpan Tilda Swinton as a solitary Scottish narratologist, and an amused Idris Elba as a genie. While it is visually luscious and bursting with (narrative) calories, it does not seem to make up its mind which genre and indeed audience it actually belongs to. ★★★☆☆
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Despite Daniel Craig’s fabulous Southern Belle, pastel-coloured play at James Bond, this oddly fragmented whodunit is more pastiche than a sequel — a collage of clever, lovingly shaped skits struggling to join the narrative stream of a single story, albeit with some of the best cameos in the business. Rides the coattails of its stellar…
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Moonage Daydream

Riveting, ravishing, richly sourced and far too long, Brett Morgen’s archival Bowie bonanza is essentially a stream of consciousness story on an era-defining genius’s lasting influence. All vintage footage and fragmented fantasy, it celebrates Bowie’s postmodernist world-view, but in that deference loses sight of the intricacies of its own medium. ★★★✩✩
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Corsage

Set up to be half-fiction, half-fact (as is quite a lot of our collective past), it executes this clever agenda in such a disorientating manner as to never allow the viewer a glimpse into its shift in cognitive gears; ingenious in framing history as an elliptical loop of vanishing hormonal cycles of a seemingly celebrated…
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The Princess

An exquisite backstage look on how a media myth is created. The obsession at its core built through years of diligent coverage. Endless streams of public opinion laid bare, thread by thread. The arc of the conjured fairytale inevitably bending towards darkness. It’s hard to outfox the mass media machine, but this doc might have…
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Fire Of Love

A poetic, fascinating watch, not only due to its unrivalled archival footage which the doomed lovers, Katia and Maurice Krafft, accumulated in their many years of cutting edge vulcanology, but because this is a film about the enduring unknowability of the origins of passion, the bittersweet impossibility of capturing the state of love. ★★★★★
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Dune

If it had been an eight minute short, with the electrical Rampling, as Reverend Mother Mohiam, pain-testing the blank slate that is Paul Atreides, to gauge his suitability for the job of a Messiah, I would have given it a five-star. However, it is over two hours long, and feels more like a scattered conversation…
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Nightmare Alley

Theatrical to a fault, and gorgeous to look at — a goth Norman Rockwell, yet hermetically sealed to insight that would turn our gaze inward, away from its mesmerising scenery, its characters suffering the same suffocating fate in its dense nocturnal world. In a film-noir a lack of inner light is not necessarily detrimental, lack…
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Judas And The Black Messiah

Compensating in visual simplicity and narrative earnestness what it lacks in storytelling flair, it is a meticulously researched endeavour focusing on the ways credible popular movements are corrupted from within, external elements introducing wrongful practices, sapping righteous energy, destroying voices which made them. ★★★☆☆
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Adrienne

Its depiction of all the sweetness, and regret of a life that was in full bloom before it brutally ended is truly chilling in its rawness and fortitude. Its weakness is the overwhelming element of testimonies and therapeutic digressions, which perhaps should have been left for the extras, rather than weaved into the narrative thread,…
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The Power Of The Dog

Enigmatic, endlessly surprising, requires time to absorb and digest, and in that very quality it exhibits its excellence and extraordinary depth. A poetic, slow-burning, merciless narration on how evil nests in a selfish soul, breaking its humanity, reducing it to a performative shell, seeking to destroy all that is vibrant and good in its midst.…
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Spencer

Stewart‘s capacity of inhabiting a character while remaining unchanged fits the narrative like a silken glove. As Diana, she entirely embodies the fiercely independent soul submerged into the archetypal, a place where she is forever chained to other souls acting as vessels to a national storyline. Mysterious, subversively cathartic. ★★★★★
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House Of Gucci

Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani Gucci is a treat, and truly did give it her all, the only one on screen that fits the form, knowing how to spin deep emotion from what might seem like a lark. The sum of all the broad strokes significantly dampens the amount of pathos necessary for a drama…
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Sisters With Transistors

An anthological expedition into the origins of machine-made sounds, this incredibly well-researched, hereto untold story of female pioneers who gave form to what is now electronic music, narrated by that icon of multimedia, Laurie Anderson, is absolutely brimming with Promethean insight, aiming for precision rather than panache. ★★★★☆
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The Starling

Written as if it were a collection of random ideas for characters, and directed at pace of a wellness seminar, it has all the makings of a film that imagines its audience unable to discern between life and a mindful soft drink commercial. Melissa McCarthy just standing in frame being the reason I give it…
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French Exit

Melancholic, world-weary, darkly funny, strangely lovely, it gifts so much more than it promises, just like its heroine. Casting Pfeiffer as the femme fatale of her own derailed life – a stroke of brilliance, making this idiosyncratic story alive with sweet familiarity. Something of a whimsy in terms of tempo, but written like it were…
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Britney Vs Spears

There is a stark difference between the tragic story of Britney Spears, and the sensationalist stories told about Britney Spears. Trying its hardest to prove its admirable intentions, this doc veers towards the latter. It does not get any closer to the human being that lives behind that perfect smile than an upset, well-meaning article…
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The Last Duel

Regardless of Sir Ridley Scott’s iconic eye, a star-studded cast does not an epic make. Casting both Damon and Affleck (the two of the three screenwriters), was way too meta not to distract from the gravity of the tale. Marguerite de Carrouges’s was a story well worth to be told on its own — It…
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The Guilty

Antoine Fuqua reteams with Nic Pizzolatto, and a fiercely committed Jake Gyllenhaal, for a sombre, flawed but ultimately harrowing chamber piece dealing with the moral dilemma of our times: how much of what we perceive to be going on is our own projection, and how much do we assume given only snippets of information? ★★★★☆
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No Time To Die

Despite the usual trappings of Bond cosmology, it treats the gadgetry and pageantry as enjoyable but dispensable, in favour of human touch. Craig redefined Bond, revealing a complex humanity beneath stellar achievement in the art of war. Sophisticated entertainment, a poignant reflexion on bioweapons, fallible heroes, and love. ★★★★★
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Paper Spiders

A well-crafted, moving, bittersweet portrait of a deteriorating psyche, and the ways any human suffering can be transcended with an open heart. Cutting close to home for the duo of filmmakers, this experiment in screen intimacy could have gone either way, given the personal stakes embedded in the material, but turned out a triumph. ★★★★☆
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Friend Of The World

A monochrome existentialist sci-fi essay on the unsustainability of the human condition in a genetically modified apocalypse is a mix of home movie and Brechtian theatre play, and a very 2020 affair. I would have preferred it less half its words, a gritty solo act, yet I did like its lo-fi ethos, trippy twists, and…
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Promising Young Woman

An explosive device, bubble-gum-wrapped in vivacious rom-com feels, an ancient tale of womanhood desecrated, a female gaze extraordinaire — on men who abuse trust, and women who enable them. More a Mesopotamian myth, evoking the goddess of love and war, rather than any sociopathic femme fatale trope in cinema. ★★★★★
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Billie

A painfully intimate, clear-eyed archival treasure of a doc set up as a tale of two women – the artist Billie and the biographer Linda, both their lives ending tragically. Holiday, as avenging angel, unifying the voices of all the lives lived before her, and ones still listening, in the dual telling of a singularity…
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Woman In The Window

A ravaged treasure of a narrative, a cornucopia of possibilities; hosted within its saturated interior one of the favourite stock characters of contemporary mystery trade — a psychologist with mental health issues. A physician struggling to heal herself. Half-way it loses its way, turning a juicy plot into a procedural psycho thriller. ★★☆☆☆
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The Capote Tapes

The darkness seething underneath the glitz in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, gruesome passion that was In Cold Blood — the underbelly of the America he knew, and left behind. Capote lived many lives, inhabited manifold identities, partied hard, betrayed rich people, and wrote elegant, sharp words for posterity. This doc tailored it all to size. ★★★★★
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The Witch Of King Cross

Fascinating take on Rosaleen Norton, artist and dedicated occultist, notoriously active in 1950s Sydney. Using all the tricks of the trade, showing fault only when it tries to render her safer for the masses, confined in feminist or archetypal tropes. An intoxicating brew, offering this unique counter-culture figure some posthumous justice. ★★★★☆
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Mank

A story of authorship, public opinion, singing for one’s supper, screwing over of a popular progressive candidate by the Hollywood propaganda machine (before Sanders, there was Upton Sinclair), and the making of Citizen Kane. A rare tribute to writing in film, one of the most honest depictions of Hollywood that Hollywood delivered. ★★★★☆
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Tesla

As cinema, somewhat of a whimsy, anywhere between Drunk History, historical reenactment, and a 1980s Eurythmics video. But, as a conceptual portrayal of the man who invented the 21st century, the enigmatic, eccentric, ultimately tragic genius Nikola Tesla, this sweetly bonkers mixtape of a film tribute is pure connoisseur delight. ★★★★☆
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Rebecca

I was curious at what a filmmaker of Wheatley’s calibre and mercurial style would bring to the ur-ghost story of cinema — a menacingly erotic depiction of an entire narrative demonically possessed by a missing protagonist. The answer is: nothing. Apologies to the superb Scott Thomas, the only one on set who understood what film…
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The Trial Of The Chicago 7

Sorkin’s rapid-fire response to the current Molotov cocktail moment in US politics seems too close to the heart of the filmmaker to be more grounded in living history than in personal sentiment, but it has Mark Rylance to hold that balance. It also brings forth a worthy central premise – justice, like revolution, cannot be…
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On The Record

Powered by the fearless testimony of Drew Dixon, as well as other survivors and activists, mostly women of colour, this an era-defining, well-crafted doc traces not only the irreversible intimate, creative, and professional loss of the survivors of sexual assault, but the loss culture suffers without brilliant voices of these women shaping it. ★★★★★
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The War On Journalism: The Case Of Julian Assange

Even if the worst of Assange is true, the question remains, how does this connect with indicting journalists for receiving classified materials in which nefarious deeds of the powerful are exposed? Solid campaign doc, reminding us that justice is not a congeniality contest. ★★★☆☆
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Lucy In The Sky

Glossy, stylistically messy semi-real life tale of suicidal ambition, gaslighting lovers, diamonds in the sky. Too erratic to go digging fully into the mud of the psychological dynamics it depicts, yet witty in its digressions. Sometimes, the right type of prose elevates the turmoil of shoddy romance, too prosaic to encounter through poetic means. ★★★☆☆
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System Crasher

A punk rock salute to the painful roots of the antisocial impulse, its tiny protagonist dressed in a shocking pink parka, chewing the scenery, racing against time and her own odds, seething with traumatised rage, frenzied wishful thinking. Social drama that reads like a thriller, its humanism unrepentant, dividing us into jailers and jailbreakers. ★★★★★
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Portrait Of A Lady On Fire

A liquid painting, absorbing details of the map that is the body and soul of the beloved, with a soundtrack burning off everything unnecessary. An Orphic hymn, both lamenting and celebrating the urgency of love, it has the beat, the feel, and the nature of the female cycle, each nodal point in a woman’s life…
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Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado

An bitter-sweet bit of astro pop history, celebrating a dazzling figure, Walter Mercado, caped wizard of entertainment-led stargazing, icon of Latinx culture, a gender-nonconforming Puerto Rican-born psychic & astrologer, with an audience of millions across the globe. ★★★☆☆
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Radioactive

Thrilling in moments, erratic in others, Satrapi’s risky, moody biopic of Marie Curie, based on a graphic novel, starring Rosamund Pike, captures the woman, but is lost between worlds, perhaps like the protagonist herself. Celebrating the determination of someone who knows her worth, no frills and no apologies for brilliance rendered. ★★★☆☆
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Spaceship Earth

Timed to perfection by a chronological deity or a prophetic team of filmmakers and marketing experts, traces a group of extraordinary individuals sealing themselves in a self-engineered replica of the Earth’s ecosystem, with sixties commune ethos, quirky eco-vision, pioneering determination, and free-spirited feels for the zeitgeist. ★★★★☆
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Where’d You Go, Bernadette

A story that waits for you at the crossroads, like the devil, ready when you are. Full of pastel, cashmere, handwoven, well-spoken, First World problems. But Bernadette has a broken heart. And this turns out to be a moving actor’s portrait of an artist’s real anguish hidden and gift-wrapped within a Gap ad that is the…
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Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.

An outrageous psychopathic political fixer, of the darkest talents and highest litigious caliber, growing in posthumous infamy with each new month of Trump presidency, as he was Donald J.’s longtime lawyer and mentor. Hence everything the 45th president of the Unites States learned about power came from Machiavelli himself. ★★★☆☆
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Land Of Ashes

A magical tale existing in a parallel dimension to ours, fully ripe and present in its vivid majesty, but never tipping into saturation. A story of the cycles of life, growing up motherless into womanhood, the living and the dead intertwined as branches of a serpent tree. Kohling your eyes seamlessly in the face of…
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Bad Education

Such a ruin can a love of luxury be. It turns otherwise endearing people astray. Makes pending sociopaths of ambitious folk with a bone to pick and a taste for the delicious. In other words, the path to self-betterment can lead to the largest public school embezzlement in American history. Jackman and Janney make them all…
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Planet Of The Humans

Controversial doc, veering towards eco fatalism, executive-produced by Micheal Moore, unpacks the extent renewable energy giants seem to depend on fossil fuels, how corporations rebrand green to access government subsidies, downsides of renewable energy, and as Vandana Shiva puts it, the way we allow ourselves to be hypnotised. ★★★☆☆
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Little Women

Episodically brilliant, with too many stitches in the narrative quilt, its often rushed sentiment suffocating genuine moments of resonant emotion. But, it has something to say about love. Watch a spirited Saoirse Ronan, author’s alter ego, gaze upon her published work. Or a wise Florence Pugh, the pragmatic sister, gaze at her man. ★★★☆☆
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1917

Mendes’s single take virtuoso stunt, a homage to his WWI veteran grandfather, highlights two things extremely well – film is a director’s medium, and its key ingredient is light. Only celluloid has that required quality, the materia to absorb and select. So, this is also Deakins’s film. His Arri Alexa mimics the medium almost perfectly.…
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The Irishman

Frank Sheeran, mob hitman, was just one empty room after another, in search of a person. That’s the gist of this magnificently made film on the boredom of thug life. Peggy, one of his daughters, highlight of the saga, doesn’t speak a word until the very end. Although there has been controversy about this, I…
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Parasite

A bonkers, intelligent, dark satirical tale of social inequality, mock egalitarian weirdness of late capitalism, class arrogance vs. monetary desperation, the perversity of the state of poverty, without being up its own moralistic agenda. Amazing cinema, ending as epic daydream, twisting the social-commentary knife some more. ★★★★★
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What Did Jack Do?

A hard-boiled noir detective interrogates a fugitive monkey suspected of murder in a crime of passion. As if fished from a opium dream, yet fitting the P. Marlowe canon perfectly, it takes a Lynch to restore one’s faith in film as medium, its capabilities as an art form, transforming into something mysterious, illuminating, worthy of…
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Bombshell

It took a grassroots revolution to demand a change in an entrenched way of dealing with sexual harassment and assault. The only way forward was to rebel furiously, collectively. Thus #MeToo was born. With all its inconsistencies and contradictions. And what a curious gestation place it had, the very epicenter of bullish conservatism. ★★★☆☆
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Marriage Story

The exposure of the personal in public carries within it a fundamental indecency, the prosaic dissecting the poetic. The former usually wins, as nobody outside a couple can really assess the intimate space between them, least of all people hired to separate them. But Baumbach achieved a public display of regret which works. ★★★★☆
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The Two Popes

The premise of faith as a fortress of dogma vs. a river emerging from one source, has been the key demarcation line in Christianity. This is intelligent filmmaking, with two powerhouse performances, telling a difficult, sensitive tale in a low-key, old-fashioned way, through the prism of two excellent minds, in opposition, yet still talking. ★★★☆☆
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Knives Out

Although I mostly write spoiler analysis, due to the nature of these reviews, I won’t here, for the sheer pleasure everyone should have while watching this most enjoyable of cinematic experiences. An antidote, if you will, to the nasty landscapes it depicts, with extreme wit and a big heart. An all-star murder mystery about inheritance.…
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Skin

A precise headshot of a vile but limited menace, in itself an aberration, but a part of a much more widespread disease, with the cult-like Viking-obsessed Vinlanders in the background, spread like a particularly repulsive smorgasbord of beer, puke and gloomy sexual encounters, every frame steeped in misery and pointless rage. ★★★☆☆
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Judy

A gold standard Hollywood biopic, with melodrama sentiments & fan mail, pale devastation of the flesh smoothed over by flashbacks re-visioning studio corruption and emotional abuse as a technicolor Oz nightmare. At its center, is a performance so raw, tender, and gut-wrenching that all the glitz only serves as a mere proverbial curtain. ★★★★☆
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Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Lee Israel wrote her forgeries perhaps better than the originals wrote their correspondences. Her downfall was her insurmountable bile, a cornucopia of foul blocking every living cell of her own creativity. This tale about hardship and friendship, ends as a perfect couplet, made beautiful by actors that can tell a human from a forgery. ★★★★☆
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Mapplethorpe

Capturing the life and times of one Robert Mapplethorpe was always going to be recklessly ambitious. He spent his life redeeming beauty back from the devil. As collateral, he gave the horned one astonishing, impeccable images, and his body, confirming the only difference between the sacred and profane in art is perspective. ★★★☆☆
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Joker

Joaquin Phoenix burns like an archangel on heroin, a contorted otherworldly presence that under a different constellation of stars would have ended up a saint, but turns to the demonic, discovering within it that creative spark he searched for all his life spent as a non-entity. Dangerous cinema, telling the truth, and lighting a match.…
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JT LeRoy

So much pain, hubris, ambition and damage to draw upon, the entire publicity farce a perfect profile of the times – the avatar being more important than the author, yet we get a breezy, well-lit tale, too mild for its material, all persona, glossy surfaces, and tiara tears. No matter that Laura Dern is fiercely up…
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Ad Astra

It sets its sights high, on its thorny way to Neptune, but it seems to lack soul material, an obscure alchemical element. In a film that aims to deal with the consequences of selfishness, it misses the mark monumentally, excluding the only ingredient that counts. Even with a core intent that is honourable, in a…
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Hail Satan?

Penny Lane’s crafty, arch entertaining doc on a growing group of civic-minded US Satanists almost got me thinking backwards, like a spell on a Black Sabbath vinyl. There’s no denying separating church and state is always a good idea. However, one must remember that Lucifer fell from grace due to hubris, not because he was…
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The Kindergarten Teacher

A viscerally disturbing take on a woman imploding in slow motion, her artistic obsession with a five-year-old poet prodigy. Gyllenhaal as Lisa possesses space like a ghost of a person she has once been, an ancient curse of the female condition – living through the creative world of another, with ferocious intensity of reclaiming one’s…
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Colette

A true gift gives you tenacity. It’s a well that never dries. Revolutionary Colette was on fire until the very end of her days, and she lived long, blessing us with that rare example of an artist that did not allow the world to shut her down. It seems that a wild spirit is crucial…
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Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

An apt allegory for the delusional arc of Hollywood, its downfall lies in the fact that this insight is most definitely accidental. A showreel glorifying the industry of canned dreams, in a backhanded kind of way, it does that pimp thing where it tries to sell you the very stuff it mocks. Its one redeeming…
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The Favourite

The fight to keep an authoritarian heart in the palm of one’s hand, the irony of love lurking underneath the strangest arrangements, this chocolate & cream cherry cake of a film, served on the finest cinematic lace, is chock-full of arsenic. That kind of poison that kills slowly, while the lovelorn mind plunges down the rabbit…
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The Brink

In Alison Klayman’s new gutsy fly-on-the-wall doc, Trump’s ex-chief strategist comes across as a charismatic, amoral, but unfortunately pretty brainy Hollywood via Harvard player, who spotted a niche in the political market for disenfranchised white man rage, and grabbed it. Bannon knows he’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He’ll be collecting. ★★★★☆
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Ice On Fire

DiCaprio opens the new climate change doc he produced offering a view of the last 250 years of humankind as the longest science experiment in history. An apt take on the magnitude of human impact on the entirety of our planet, the arrogant, unhinged way we’ve been unleashing ourselves on our environment, and Mother Earth.…
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The Wife

Glenn Close as Joan is a magnificent melting iceberg, an environmental disaster long in the making, the wife of a soon-to-be Nobel laureate in literature, all manipulative steeliness and nihilistic martyrdom, a woman that signed a Faustian deal that now reached its inevitable conclusion. Joan’s a sell-out. Brilliant and infuriating. ★★★★☆
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The Miseducation Of Cameron Post

This coming-of-age tale manages to nail the intricacies of emotional abuse in such terrible detail, while muted by pastel colours of Akhavan’s narrative zaniness, that all the twisted soul demolitions of the young being forced to ‘pray the gay away’ suddenly creep up on us, spinning into one heavy gasp of rage against the machine.…
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Third Eye Spies

Essential mainstream doc on PSI research, a much denigrated fringe topic, and a Pandora’s Box of disturbing possibilities, one that, perhaps, should not have been left solely for the military to explore. Chock-full of top-tier scientists, high-grade spooks, plus a Nobel laureate and an Apollo astronaut thrown in, for good measure. ★★★★☆
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The Front Runner

The 1987 campaign story of disgraced Colorado senator, and Democratic Party front-runner, Gary Hart, is as tough as aspirin compared to what we now digest daily. What it did make me do is rethink the Clinton presidency, how the pragmatist philanderer made it to the White House, while the idealist one became a pariah. ★★★☆☆
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The Aftermath

There is an element missing here, the key component to any story of conflict and passion – namely, the passion. It does not bode well for a story of a tumultuous affair if the only performance with conviction, in a love triangle, is given by the betrayed husband. Thus, the entire construction falls apart as…
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Destroyer

A sun-scorched, store damaged, furious street rant on the ways we destroy others, but more on the ways we let ourselves be destroyed. Detective Bell’s hollow glare serves as an extraordinarily well executed hook – each time we look at her face, we compare it to our mental image of Kidman. And the emotional mayhem…
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The House That Jack Built

The devil mistakes aesthetics for art, disdains the body, and in close-up is one dull mofo. Von Trier grabs your head and shoves it into the vortex of any subject he chooses to examine. Never a pleasant journey, but he delivers. I gave it four stars, not five, although in its way, it’s perfect. A film…
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Disobedience

Depicting a life led in an environment of strict rules, it balances cherishing of one’s heritage with a longing that is entirely individual. This could have been a film on forbidden love, but it was way smarter — it’s a story of self-love, the love of life that is in our nature, the blessed disobedience of…
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Cold War

An experience of profound beauty and heartache, it’s glorious. A spell of sorts. It has that defiant spirit of divine intervention hidden beneath a beautiful, silent, terrible mistake. This is lovers as high stakes gamblers, raising the bar of their commitment to one another to vertiginous heights. Their story, a diamond and a dagger, in…
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Mary Queen Of Scots

The way the director framed it, and Ronan and Robbie fleshed it out, helped me understand what it must have felt like to have a female form and nature at that time, full of ripe wants and infinite prohibitions. Competing with men for a place of power, while at the same time being a place…
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BlacKkKlansman

At best, a witty political gut-punch made for a certain type of audience that likes things served neatly. If it had been more artistically rigorous with the slapstick, it could have arrived at Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, and taken that point home, guns blazing. It turned out to be a sledgehammer to a rusty nail, painting…
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Widows

Davis is relentlessly on point, steely in her awareness of how close her life came to oblivion, a subjugation to a fate that was not of her own making, but rather of her own willing blindness. All the widows’ performances are honed to perfection, achieving something truly miraculous nowadays, exhibiting agency without arrogance. ★★★★☆
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First Man

Elegantly cutting through Cold War politics, slippery metaphors on masculinity, the now archaic technologies yet still very raw societal injustices, the audacity of a venture building up as monumental ego trip of a nation — this is a story that finds its heart in a silence, mystery of the inner cosmos. The micro and macro aligned.…
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The Other Side Of Everything

It lands on a piece of me that is yet to accept loss – the devouring of a chunk of my life by the gods of lesser value. This is why I could not take it in any other way than lightly. My full attention would’ve meant giving in to a lack of meaning. A…
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Maria By Callas

It was the humanity in the delivery of divinity that was the key to Callas’s impact, the way she knew, by some uncanny ability, just how to channel an archetype. We do not learn more of Maria Callas than she herself would allow, but we understand, instinctively, how much a gift like hers overtakes a…
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My Cousin Rachel

The ill-fated relationship seems to be merely the departure not the destination, the anti-climatic tryst itself making way for a rather sombre study of cultural prejudice and misogyny. A sophisticated exploration of the consequences of an active and complex female sexuality in what polite society designated to be a woman’s timid, matronly years. ★★★☆☆
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The Happy Prince

Everyone feels they know much of Oscar Wilde, the ultimate prophet laureate of pop culture, but no one can really come close to grasping a micron of that man’s life until they understand Clapham Junction. If Oscar was not so loud, proud and unrepentant, would he have been made to suffer humiliation as much by…
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The Tale

A wound festering, sexual damage mentally packaged as a taboo love affair, an irreversible seduction interpreted as consensual in the imaginings of a 13-year-old girl determined to preserve the right of her passage to womanhood. Artistic faults, and inconsistencies be damned, this film is an act of pure courage, a masterclass in honesty. ★★★★☆
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First Reformed

As the contemplative pace and mundane minutia carries on, it becomes a precious exercise in observing one’s own boredom threshold. In the end, it swept me like high tide, much as a windfall of good luck can disorient us when we are deep in mourning – this painful, beautiful, essential meditation on isolation, how we…
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How To Talk To Girls At Parties

If the Sex Pistols, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and X-Files had a threesome and spawned one single entity, you’d get John Cameron Mitchell’ s zany yet weirdly ordinary love story. For all its vulgarian chutzpa, punk DIY ethos, and visual high jinx, it’s a boy-meets-girl-loses-girl, makes it in the world, but is still lonely, kind of tale. ★★☆☆☆
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Revenge

This grindhouse slice of rough is as bloody as they get. But once you transcend the gore, the sheer originality of its dynamics, the ingenious transgression of its point of view, which happens to be a according to a woman’s frame, makes it a thrill ride of mythic proportions. An ancient tale of retribution —…
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Beast

A charming, filthy, sexy stranger saves a lass from an unwanted advance, tells her he will fix her, the Kundalini starts rising, and the two embark on both a joyous and chilling folie à deux, to the horror of her family. A Colt 45 of a film, silver bullet of dark erotica, fertile pathology, a…
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Funny Cow

Peake is the eponymous funny cow, a woman with no escape other than in endless repetition of family history, class mentality, gender predicament. This is no comedy — not that it isn’t darkly funny, depicting humour not as a relief, but at the centre of the disease. A punctured ulcer reeking of that which it…
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Isle Of Dogs

The source of magic behind Wes Anderson’s incredible creations, a blend of innocence and weltschmerz, is that he stays true to himself — an outsider to the worlds he creates, but which he loves, absolutely. This gives his work an affectionate, deeply intellectual quality, what reviewers and industry professionals like to call ‘whimsy’. ★★★★☆
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