Festival Review: Fire At Sea (2016)
★★★★☆
Half-documentary, half-fiction, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare paints a portrait of life on Lampedusa with its fishing traditions and new waves of migrants.
★★★★☆
Half-documentary, half-fiction, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare paints a portrait of life on Lampedusa with its fishing traditions and new waves of migrants.
★★★★☆
Vibrant, ridiculous and bombastic, Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice treads a deliciously new path of metaphor and internalised anxiety.
★★★★☆
A riotous romp through Hollywood’s golden age, the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! is a hilarious tribute to the (strangely religious) cult of cinema.
★★★★☆
A stunning feature debut for director Stephen Fingleton, The Survivalist is a tense post-apocalyptic thriller with a strangely rural setting.
★★★★☆
Nimble, witty and downright rib-tickling, Tim Miller’s Deadpool takes on the superhero genre with postmodern sharpness.
★★★★☆
Hollywood eats itself in Jay Roach’s comprehensively entertaining biopic of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, earning Bryan Cranston an Oscar nomination.
★★★★☆
A humanistic Icelandic tragi-comedy, Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams sees two estranged brothers forced to unite to save their prized rams.
★★★★☆
Grant Gee’s Innocence of Memories is a multilayered exploration of the innovative novel Museum of Innocence by the Turkish Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk.
★★★★☆
Fast-paced comedy-drama about the global financial crash, Adam McKay’s The Big Short makes brilliant entertainment out of a true story of men behaving madly.
★★★★☆
An electrifying and gripping tale of one man’s journey back from the dead, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant finds an unexpectedly spiritual side to revenge.
★★★★☆
With heartbreaking performances from an exceptional cast, Lenny Abrahamson’s Room is a triumph of delicate relationships and emotional fallout.
★★★★☆
Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room is a bizarre yet affectionate pastiche of all those films from his favourite filmmaking eras that never got made.
★★★★☆
A lot of fun with an emotional punch, Paul Weitz’s Grandma is an Oscar-worthy tour de force for Lily Tomlin as a rambunctious lesbian feminist grandmother.
★★★★☆
Exposing a drug fuelled, self-destructive seam within London’s gay community, William Fairman and Max Gogarty’s Chemsex makes for intoxicating viewing.