Reviews on The Review

Shutter Island is a rather odd film. The script is sometimes very good; its abrupt transitions and elliptical style ensure a good if not great performance from the film’s main star, Leonardo Dicaprio. But elsewhere the script feels stagey and mannered, resulting in rather forced performances from the European players who play the supporting characters, [...]

This quiet, lovely Japanese ensemble piece is much haunted. It is haunted by the constant presence of Junpei, the older son whose death by drowning is the cause for the family gathering this film records. It is haunted by the Japanese film maker Yazojiro Ozu and, in particular, his Tokyo Story whose pale but intense [...]

According to the inverse law of action movie length vs. depth, every too familiar nuance of this nearly three-hour ‘epic’ can be recounted in a couple of breaths: A disabled ex-soldier is sent in to improve relations with an indigenous population who stand in the way of some economically precious natural resource. Inevitably, he grows [...]

Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga is a revenge tragedy set in a part of modern-day Europe so remote that people still turn the hay by hand, put strangers up for the night and where a lone woman can drive her son on a horse and cart for miles between villages. Yet it is a place [...]

With so much debate today focussing on immigration, it seems strange that so few films have looked at the topic. Hollywood rarely goes near it for anything other than a new slant on romantic comedy (remember Green Card?) and Michael Winterbottom’s In this world remains a fairly rare instance in European cinema. Yet the immigrant [...]

Ever since taking the best foreign picture Oscar for Todo Sobre mi Madre, Pedro Almodóvar has seen anything he does loved by the majority of his fans, regardless of its actual quality. His films can belabour under ridiculous plots or drift along without even the merest hint of narrative [...]

German feature Jerichow made its UK debut at 2009’s Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19 June, and is arguably more appealing and straightforwardly enjoyable than many of the more high-profile premieres screened there so far.
Benno Furmann plays brooding ex-soldier Thomas, deep in debt and with few prospects, who moves into his mother’s country house [...]

Coming just four months after the UK release of his last film, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is something of a departure for respected film and theatre director Sam Mendes.  The compositional beauty and sinister, or, at least, restless, undertone for which he is renowned have been replaced with single-take scenes and light-hearted camaraderie between [...]

The iconic beginning to this film – Polish refugees run from both sides onto a bridge, one side running from the Russians, the others running from the Germans, and the equally iconic, relentless slaughter which end the film, will be well known to anyone who has looked at the reviews of this remarkable document.  Equally [...]

Werner Herzog’s new film is a documentary about workers on a scientific research base in Antarctica. It has many of the hallmarks of his previous documentary work, including stunning panoramic shots, the vaguely creepy off-camera voice that sounds like it could be enticing Hansel and Gretel to come into the gingerbread house, and, of course, [...]