The filmmakers behind Love Lies Bleeding (director Rose Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska) are, as Glass describes “obviously … both film nerds”. The film has a broad archive of references ranging from the works of influential queer filmmaker John Waters to The Incredible Hulk (2008). A neo-noir, queer crime thriller, Love Lies Bleeding also… Continue reading Love Lies Bleeding Review: this vengeful queer romance is a visceral cinematic experience
The film, directed by Mark Mylod, known for producing and directing the acclaimed series Succession, satirises the culture of high-end dining. From the perspective of our combined expertise in food and literary studies and sexuality studies, we’re interested in how the film asks us to consider what’s left when even the most fundamental bodily pleasures are turned into… Continue reading The Menu review: delve into foodie snobbery when you’re dying for a cheeseburger
Every genre film is engaged – as self-aware genre pastiches like the Scary Movie (2000) and Scream (1996) franchises cannily acknowledge – in a conversation with its predecessors. The western, the longest-lived of all major genres, has been commenting on and reworking its own traditions since the silent era. Director and screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar’s new… Continue reading Strange Way of Life review: Pedro Almodóvar’s 30-minute queer western is a tender miniature
Never one to downplay the power of film, Stanley Kubrick once said that “almost every novel could be successfully adapted”. He carried this confidence into his own filmmaking, working not from original screenplays, but from adaptations of novels as different as William Makepeace Thackeray’s historical romp Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic fantasy Lolita (1955). Even Kubrick, however, allowed for the possibility… Continue reading White Noise review: director Noah Baumbach skilfully captures Don Delillo’s ‘unadaptable’ novel
Nothing about The Green Knight, the new film from director David Lowery, is comfortable. From its opening scene, where Gawain (Dev Patel) sits in an empty throne room, a crown menacingly hovering above his head as flames suddenly engulf him, this film is wonderfully unsettling. The Green Knight is a reimagining of the Middle English… Continue reading The Green Knight review: a wonderfully unsettling cinematic reimagining of the medieval story of Sir Gawain
Christopher Andrews’ “Bring Them Down,” starring Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott, Sean Dunn’s “The Fall Of Sir Douglas Weatherford,” and Marianne Elliott’s “The Salt Path,” featuring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, are among the eight films selected for the Great 8 showcase. This showcase presents new UK feature films from first and second-time UK filmmakers… Continue reading BFI and British Council reveal great eight showcase for Cannes
A longtime passion project for Coppola, who first conceived the film in 1979 and actively started developing it in 1983, it underwent significant delays and numerous cancellations over the years, until Coppola revived the project in 2019 by spending $120 million of his own money on the film, which was filmed from November 2022 to… Continue reading TRAILERWATCH: Megalopolis
Director Rachel Lambert’s sweet and sedate film Sometimes I Think About Dying frames suicidal thoughts as a strategy for survival. In the film, introverted office worker Fran (Daisy Ridley) takes solace in increasingly elaborate, surreal and aesthetic fantasies of her own death, including hanging from a crane, lying dead in the woods and being attacked… Continue reading Sometimes I Think About Dying Review: finally, a film about women’s mental health without the cliches
As a mother trying to raise a daughter free from the gendered stereotypes of my own childhood, I steered her clear of Barbie dolls. I felt compelled to nudge my now 11-year-old away from the Mattel mainstay for the same reasons I tried to avoid the shallow frivolity of all those Disney princesses waiting around… Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love the doll – a feminist philosopher’s journey back to Barbie
There has been much discussion about the film’s feminist potential (or betrayal). What’s not being talked about in mainstream reviews is disability. This seems strange when two of the film’s main characters are disabled. Set in a fantasy version of Victorian London, unorthodox Dr Godwin Baxter (William Dafoe) finds the just-dead body of a heavily… Continue reading Should ‘Poor Things’ be recognised as a film about disability?
