Excellent movie. From the sprawling epic The Odyssey, Uberto Passolini chooses to focus on the final challenge of King Odysseus, when he returns home to find both his home and himself changed. Instead of the spectacle of battle, we get a tense, introspective meditation on the inability to ever really go home again. Which is…
This film is doing a thing, the thing is just not for me. Richard Herring once did an hour-long set just stretching out one joke about yoghurt. This is like that, only it’s about Linda McCartney vegetarian ready meals, in film form. This feels like an Edinburgh Fringe show that ran on a bare stage…
My favourite film of the festival so far! So funny. Just great. Stellar cast. So identifiable. Edward is caring for his elderly mother Alma, who is paralysed down one side and has lost the ability to speak, save for using the text-to-speech app on her ipad. She doesn’t let that stop her though, making her…
Hold onto your seat because this is the film you’ve all been waiting for, a movie about an English DJ in Spain who falls for his manic pixie dream girl. She dies, so he takes an experimental drug to allow him to have lucid dreams where he can be with her. It’s an after-life rom-com.…
What a rollercoaster! The Luckiest Man in America is about a guy who goes on a morning game show and becomes the record-breaking biggest winner in the show’s history. Going into the film, I was like, sounds interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s enough drama for a full movie. Oh, it’s plenty of drama,…
This film starts with the burning of a barn and ends with the burning of a world. This is being billed as a folk horror and it’s not. It’s a kitchen sink drama. At the end of harvest, a fire burns down the barn of the benevolent landowner. Master Kent, played by Harry Melling, has…
Okay, some ground rules for going into this movie. It is about a U.S. veteran, so it is set firmly in the American unquestioned, unchallenged veneration of the military. So no asking obvious questions beyond the frame in which this story is told. Once you accept those ground rules, this is actually a solidly good…
I think Four Little Adults is meant to be a comedy but it’s Finnish so I can’t be sure. Polyamory explored through the lens of the most boring, middle-class, middle-aged white couple you ever met. And by explore, I mean, kinda just point to the fact it exists, and use all the characters and plot…
Have you heard the one about Louis C.K.? Sorry/Not Sorry traces the fall and rise of Louis C.K. following the exposure of his history sexually harassing women. It talks to the women who spoke out, and subsequently received a slew of hate, and juxtaposes this against Louis selling out Madison Square Gardens, winning a Grammy,…
A dark fairytale from France. 19th century gothic novella The Family of the Vourdalak gets a Hammer Horror-esque adaptation in this satisfying vampire yarn. Simpering fop Marquis de blah de blah is mugged while being sent as a French court envoy across Eastern Europe. He is told he can get himself a new horse at…