For audiences interested in the effect of our shifting media landscape on democracy, the weaving of archival footage and personal stories with narrative momentum makes NEWS WITHOUT A NEWSROOM thoughtful, relevant, and well-timed.
ANEMONE is fortunate in being able to call upon Daniel Day-Lewis’s first film performance in eight years. Although Ronan Day-Lewis manages to garner a performance of simmering intensity from his father, their co-written script is flat and opaque to the point of tedium.
Both Shakespeare and Zhao acknowledge the beauty of grief, which is, of course, a form of love, as well as its horrific reality. Whatever you have lost will be touched upon when you see this film. Tears streamed down my face, my breath coming in shudders by the end.
If Shelley’s novel can be considered the dense and sprawling sheet music for an orchestral symphony of ideas, then Del Toro’s arrangement here is sparser. However, even if the result lacks some of the richness laid out on the page, the tune of FRANKENSTEIN extracts tension, horror and beauty that harmonises with the full version.
With seething social commentary at its centre, BAD APPLES feels contemporary and culturally accurate to the landscape of public education in the UK. Normality becomes quickly warped by extenuating circumstances, and director Jonatan Etzler wields the school setting with skill.
While WAKE UP DEAD MAN may not bring anything novel for newcomers to the series, it’s a treat for KNIVES OUT fans, serving as a corrective for the excesses of GLASS ONION and imbuing the story with meaningful resonance for contemporary Christian politics.
BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER rarely fails to be entertaining, with the visuals and performances taking the film a long way. However, they are fleeting thrills in the service of an unmemorable story. Edward Berger’s film looks like a high roller, but it’s playing with buttons and matchsticks.
TO OUR FRIENDS posits some kind of theory about the tectonic shifts our social worlds go through and forwards that theory with documentarian conventions. In attempting to figure themselves out, people are always making it up as they go along, and their relationships may thrive or suffer in the wake of life’s vicissitudes. Wave after wave might strike us, and all we can really do is just keep treading water.
Nora Fingscheidt’s third feature film, THE OUTRUN, offers a raw and honest look into the life of an addict in the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland. Based on Amy Liptrot’s critically acclaimed memoir of the same name, this film proves to be a faithful adaptation of a source that is part journal and part nature textbook.
A PALE VIEW OF HILLS lives up to a strong cinematic legacy of Ishiguro adaptations with its stunning, dreamy aesthetic and the performances of a talented cast across generations, but the script does not achieve the nuances of its preceding adaptations.
