Angel is the story of a Belgian professional cyclist hiring a Senegalese sex worker for the night. He is the most unbearable self-pitying, braggart, blowhart, drug-addled, misogynistic, abusive, utter cunt. He is as likeable as Joffrey. I genuinely spent the movie hoping he’d die soon. For all his privilege, wealth, fame and talent, he is…
All Creatures Here Below starts out as a road trip crime caper when two simpletons abduct a baby in order to start a new life as a family elsewhere. The light humour gives way to something much darker as the movie goes on. Actually grim as fuck. Bailed on the Q&A because picking over something…
Erased,____Ascent of the Invisible is as much activist art as it is a documentary. It examines the legacy of the disappeared during the Lebanese Civil War (a part of history I am woefully ignorant about). It looks at how the photographs used to find the missing became part of a conglomerate whole, and the search…
Is Loro a biopic or a satire? The trouble is Silvio Berlusconi is such a mad, revolting bastard that it’s hard to tell what elements are fictionalised and what are just the truth presented so grotesquely that it seems unbelievable. The film follows Berlusconi pouting after he goes into opposition in the late 2000s and…
You wouldn’t think you could make a lesbian love story set in 1950s Scotland boring, but somehow Tell It To The Bees manages it. And this is me, someone who could like nothing more than queer women in period dress in raunchy sex scenes. And yet. And what is meant to be a sexy love…
Keep Going is a cowboy movie of a kind. Two partners cross the Kyrgyzstan steppe on horseback. An angry young man and his estranged mother, struggling to find common ground across this trying journey. In another way it is a love story, of a man letting go of years of resentment and allowing himself to…
Werewolf is set in the absolute chaos following the liberation of the concentration camps. The prisoners, the Nazis and their brutal attack dogs flee into the surrounding countryside. A group of children are set up in an abandoned mansion, and told to waited for supplies once Allied lines are solidified. But the food never comes,…
The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary about a journalist’s struggle to uncover the decades-long mass surveillance of her hometown community of Muslim Arab-Americans in Bearview, Illinois. In some ways the film ends up focusing more on her than on the subject she’s covering because she can never concretely get tangible proof and the…
Magical realism from Sweden, Border is based on a short story by John Ajvide Linquist, author of Let The Right One In. Tina is half sniffer dog, half woman, capable of smelling deception. She works at border control where she uses her talent to stop ne’erdowells. From there the story forks into her helping track…
Aquarela started 15 minutes late because the producer decided to introduce the movie by giving its entire thesis. As she did so, I had a sinking feeling the movie might be shit. This was compounded when the opening theme music, repeated intermittently throughout the film, was a bash of utterly shit nu metal. When it…