All posts by Simon Bowie

Peacock

The premise of renting people to fill social roles resembles Werner Herzog’s FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC or Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS. Still, Bernhard Wenger, the film’s writer and director, takes the film in a different direction that feels very Östlund-esque but without Östlund’s satirical bite. As the film concludes, it feels like it has pulled its punches a little.

Stealing Pulp Fiction

STEALING PULP FICTION has an ironic postmodern sensibility combining a reverence for cinema and the cinema-going experience – midnight screenings, overflowing tubs of popcorn, the smell of 35mm prints – with an ironic appreciation of Quentin Tarantino’s own postmodern work.

Presence

PRESENCE may be destined to simply be another formally experimental work for Soderbergh, but there is enough compelling drama and character work that it deserves more consideration than that.

Bird

Andrea Arnold’s latest film, BIRD, is a beguiling blend of British social realism and magical realism, exposing the deep yearning towards nature in a dying England left adrift at the end of the world.