Euphoria and devastation are the twin emotional poles that prop up the lopsided big top that is Oliver Laxe’ Sirât, a film about life, death, and music that’s not made for your ears but for your heart. The film opens with...
In a landscape where film festivals have had to jostle violently for the attention of sales agents and studios, it helps if you’ve cultivated a specific vibe and an identifiable audience. Austin’s South By Southwest (SXSW) is eking ever closer to its...
The story is delivered through the awed narration of Sister Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), which allows us to enjoy the occasional juicy episode that was the product of hearsay or gossip. Yet Fastvold is admirably measured in the way she...
On June 7 2024 Charli XCX unleashed a monster. Green, mean and only 41:23 minutes long, ‘brat’ wasn’t just an album – it was an entire summer. And then it was a global phenomenon that dominated pop culture long after the leaves turned golden....
I discovered the work of the American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman through sheer pot lock. I used to work for the film section of Time Out London magazine, and my job involved writing capsule reviews for repertory and festival screenings that...
The Looney Tunes have admittedly fallen on hard times in recent years. As far as animation was concerned, David Zaslav’s feckless régime at Warner Brothers saw the medium as a whole as an easy cut, leaving a historic library in limbo until...
Few birthday celebrations can ever match the surreal spectacle that the Iraqi state would enforce each year that Saddam Hussein would complete a lap around the sun. Since he took power in 1979, every corner of the country would be enveloped...
“Now that sex is available to us in hardcore porno films, death remains the one last taboo in cinema,” wrote the film critic Amos Vogel in 1980. Sex and death, Vogel believed, were the two facets of life hidden behind closed...
Markiplier is far from the only YouTuber to see success lately in theatrical cinema – Talk to Me filmmakers the Philippou Brothers and Skinamarink visionary Kyle Edward Ball spring to mind. “It’s novel until it’s not – and then it’s expected,” offers Fischbach. “That’s...
The transformative power of water lies at the heart of American writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, informed by her adolescent dreams of swimming being her escape from an abusive childhood home. The Chronology of Water tracks the tides of her life...
