Please note: this review discusses some points re: the film’s structure which could potentially offer mild spoilers. The Unheard (2023) feels like a difficult film to review as one, cogent whole. It doesn’t demarcate a number of chapters with title cards, like an awful lot of films do, but feels very much like two, distinct, […]
We seem to be living through something of a golden age for documentary film. With the rise and rise of Netflix and other platforms, there now seems to be endless scope to provide for people’s endless appetite for them, to queue them up; they don’t necessarily only want to see great, momentous events being explored, […]
The horrific side of motherhood has been amply explored in films recently, with varying levels of success; Adalynn (2023) takes its place amongst them, and appropriately, its own success is variable. It certainly has excellent intentions, focusing its scrutiny on a new mother for whom the walls start to close in. But it quickly becomes […]
Plot is not a primary concern in the close-at-hand speculative fiction of Rubikon (2022): that’s not to suggest it’s another of those art installation type films which evades a storyline completely, but it is a slow, quiet, morose kind of film on the whole. It could easily have been done very differently. A few things […]
Meet Millicent. She’s a twenty-one year old student working on a thesis about children with severe allergies, which means that a prospective babysitting job could double up as useful research. This is because the child needing a sitter, Johnny (Danilo Crovetti) has a seemingly endless list of issues: he has the mother lode of severe […]
There’s a common theme throughout They Wait in the Dark, clear from the opening seconds, and it relates to the cycle of abuse: how damaged children become damaged adults, making choices which perpetrate further harm – to themselves and others. There’s some room for debate on how convincingly this is done overall in the film, […]
Who’d want to be a teenager today? Sure, for many teens living in the West there’s an immensity of privileges, but these come at a cost: more pressure, more scrutiny than ever. The Jane of this film departs the narrative in its very earliest scenes by committing suicide (off-camera, but clear). Scroll forward in time, […]
Solid Rock Trust starts with purpose and forward momentum: this in itself marks it out from a lot of rather more nebulous fare doing the rounds these days. We start a few minutes out from a significant bank heist, and we start as we mean to go on. Something big is happening, and it’s being […]
To do Skinamarink (2022) credit, all of its tedious blunders are strongly represented in the first few minutes; you don’t need to wait the full one hundred to feel cheated. The warning signs are there, and they’re there good and early: the opening credits which proclaim that it is ‘1995’, though breaking that spell by […]
Friend of the World (2020) starts with a few moments of that kind of angst which can only come from a place of relative practical comfort. Hence, as we see a woman meander back and forth against a beautiful, sunny backdrop, a female voice ponders her own lack of engagement with the world; she wants […]
Teddy Told Me To (2022) comes from that place of oddly warm nostalgia which many horror fans have for the films they saw growing up – as grisly and oddball as many of those films were, they feel comforting and familiar. It also updates things, by adding in the phenomena of YouTubers, live streaming, state-of-the-art […]