Savage is brutal, devastating, powerful. It features a war of attrition borne of a tyrannical upbringing in New Zealand told in three time-frames over 24 years. Savages is the name given to a patched-up gang started by a couple of cell mates from juvenile detention. But let’s go back a step, Danny – known in…
Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) works hard – in a bar and at a mortuary – to keep her head above water and make something of herself. But, of course, the bills keep coming in. In 2004 it looked like the world was at her feet. That was when she won the title of Miss Juneteenth*…
Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
I saw a movie called G-Loc a while ago. And my first thought now was: “Why not try another SF?” [*sci-fi – ed.]. Not only because it’s one of my favorite genres. But because G-Loc was horrible and a disappointment in every way. And I wanted to forget this ordeal as soon as possible by…
The Devil All the Time is a sprawling and multi-layered Southern Gothic tale of good and evil. The film offers a rich tapestry of amoral and unsavoury characters and explores that potent nexus between religion, sex and violence, fate and faith. The atypical and nonlinear narrative spans a couple of decades between the end of…
Are you an Agatha Christie fan? Does nothing get you going quite like a drawing room mystery? If you said yes, then Régis Roinsard’s stylish mystery The Translators (Les traducteurs) will be catnip for you. But Roinsard and his screenwriting collaborators Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt give the genre a modern sheen with a comprehensive…
Secrets of the past hang over Yuval Adler’s drama, The Secrets We Keep. Maja (Noomi Rapace) suffers from her experiences as a Romanian gypsy during World War II. To this point she’s kept the dark secret to herself. She’s forged a new life with her husband, Lewis (Chris Messina) – a GP – and young…
Things no one will say about Charlie Kaufman’s new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things: “Aww, that was sweet”; “What a cliched Hollywood ending”; “That movie made total sense”. Kaufman’s latest excursion into weirdness is almost Bergman-esque in its inscrutability. Indeed, it shares more than a little DNA with Bergman’s classic Persona (1966). But as…
A D-grade horror thriller featuring bad acting and a wafer-thin plot, Becky boasts four particularly gory scenes. Senior school student Becky (Lulu Wilson) is doing it tough. She was close to her mum who died of cancer and she refuses to engage with her father, Jeff (Joel McHale). Now Jeff drops a bombshell, telling Becky…
The sensitive and affecting film Adam takes a close up look at two women from a poor Casablanca neighbourhood caught in an emotional maelstrom. Abla (Lubna Azabal) is a dour widowed mother who can’t get over the untimely death of her husband. Meanwhile, Samia (Nisrin Erradi) faces the imminent birth of a child alone and…
