Hayao Miyazaki is one of the great cinema artists of recent decades. Through the famed Studio Ghibli he has helped craft an animation style as evocative, moving and meaningful as any Disney classic or live action film for that matter. After claiming to have retired in 2013 he has returned with the long awaited The Boy And The Heron. The
Read moreKen Loach is one of contemporary cinema’s most important auteurs. Now, four years after his emotionally gruelling depiction of the gig economy’s impact on working class Britain in Sorry We Missed You, he returns with the immigration drama, The Old Oak. In a career that stretches back to the 1960’s, Loach has carved a distinctive niche in left wing humanist
Read moreThe suspiciously named Bottoms is a gleefully silly, occasionally witty and slightly subversive teen comedy in the tradition of Heathers and Booksmart with a touch of Fight Club. The film throws feminist and queer politics into the mix but is mainly a quirky and acerbic comedy. Friends PJ (Rachel Sennot who cowrote) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear) are desperate
Read moreI had never heard of Australian artist David Bromley but apparently he’s hugely successful and according to the documentary, Bromley: Light After Dark, his work is ubiquitous in upper middle-class homes. This mostly uplifting documentary examines his work and the aspects of his life, like family, that he cherishes and that have sustained him in his battles with mental illness.
Read moreSaltburn, is writer/director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her striking but erratic feature debut, Promising Young Woman. More stylistically assured than that film, Saltburn is an enjoyably strange, dark satire of class consciousness, poisonous wealth and social exclusion so full of indelible scenes that we can mostly overlook some slightly shaky storytelling. Barry Keoghan, who was unforgettable in the Banshees of
Read moreThe dystopian sci-fi film series, The Hunger Games was hugely successful and a cultural touchstone for many young cinema goers (but not so much this reviewer). Through those films, Jennifer Lawrence established herself as a major star playing heroine, Katniss Everdeen who, in a post-apocalyptic future, competed in the eponymous televised teen gladiator death matches and battled the fictional nation
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