Review: ‘Beach Rats’
In her first feature, It Felt Like Love (2013), Eliza Hittman explored a young Brooklyn girl’s troubled life as she…
Reviews
Review: ‘On The Beach At Night Alone’
Hong Sangsoo’s On the Beach At Night Alone is in fact two films. Shot by different cinematographers (Kim Hyung-koo and Park…
Review: ‘Redoubtable’
In her memoir Un an après, the purported basis for Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, the late Anne Wiazemsky recalls her astonishment, at…
Review: ‘Okja’
Much like Okja the genetically modified pig, Okja the film had a controversial and ground-breaking genesis. It is one of…
Review: ‘Mary Shelley’
Haifaa al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley suggests that the eponymous writer’s classic novel Frankenstein is the result of the influence of men…
Review: Top of the Lake: China Girl
TW: Rape Top of the Lake was brilliant, but it didn’t always make for easy viewing. Any story in which…
Choreographies of Relation: Female Subjectivity in ‘A Woman, a Part’ (2016)
Elisabeth Subrin’s A Woman, a Part opens with an image of three figures in single file, arms reaching upwards in…
Review: ‘Wind River’
TW: rape The idea of making a thriller based around the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women is startling:…
Review: ‘The Beguiled’
Virginia, 1864. The Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies – five pupils of varying ages, under the care of Miss Martha…
Review: ‘Wonder Woman’
Wonder Woman has carried a particularly heavy weight of expectation on her shoulders right from the announcement of the film….
Review: Agnès Varda’s ‘Faces, Places’ (‘Visages, Villages’)
The spirit of Visages, Villages is present even before its first frame when an animated version of Agnès Varda appears during…
Review: ‘The Handmaiden’
TW: Mention of sexual abuse Park Chan-Wook’s rework of Sarah Waters’s celebrated novel Fingersmith feels a lot like rope play:…
Review: ‘Personal Shopper’
In the opening scene of Personal Shopper, a young woman drives up to the high gates of a large house….
Review: ‘Cameraperson’
In one scene in Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, we see a USB stick being thrown into a concrete mixer. Shot while…
Review: ‘The Future Perfect’
The future perfect is a strange tense. It describes actions that are going to be completed: what will have happened,…
Review: ‘Certain Women’
“It would be so lovely to think that, if I were a man, I could explain the law and people…
Review: ‘Toni Erdmann’
When asked to reduce Toni Erdmann to its essential outline, the German actor Sandra Hüller, who plays Ines, described it…
Review: ‘Jackie’
Jackie, the first English-language film by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, offers a compellingly uneasy and nuanced portrait of one of…
Review: ‘La La Land’ and its discontents
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land has turned out to be a fascinatingly divisive film. It has enchanted thousands and swept up a…
Review: ‘American Honey’
The road movie, particularly the American road movie, is a genre with a long and rich heritage. Its protagonists are…
Review: ‘The Dreamed Ones’
It is difficult to escape the feeling of being an interloper when listening to intimate letters spoken aloud. In the…