The Green Knight

It’s a long time since I indulged my appetite for Arthurian legend. So I was looking forward immensely to David Lowery’s take on Sir Gawain’s tale. And I certainly wasn’t disappointed. The opening was just bewitching; alliterative 14th Century verse accompanies a sumptuous shot of Gawain’s coronation – before his newly crowned head bursts into…

The War Below

If you’re acquainted with Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong then you’ll be under familiar ground with this debut feature from director JP Watts. It’s the true story of five Yorkshire miners who join the Royal Engineers to bring some professionalism to the task of burrowing under the German lines at Messines Ridge in 1917. The story is…

Herself

Cathy Come Home meets Grand Designs in Phyllida Lloyd’s homespun yarn about an abused mother battling seemingly impossible odds to keep herself and her two young daughters safe. The film really belongs to Clare Dunn who co wrote and stars as Sandra, a Dublin mum trying to forge a life apart from her abusive husband…

Annette

Adam Driver goes La La in La La land but I really don’t know how to respond to this ambitious project from the mind of Leos Carax and the muse of Sparks. It was by turns absurd, boring, cathartic, dark, enthralling, fantastic, ghoulish, half-witted, idiosyncratic, jaw-dropping, kooky, ludicrous, memorable, nightmarish, oblique, puppettastic, quantum, risible, sumptuous,…

The Last Bus

Let this be a lesson to me. Ordinarily I avoid trailers. In fact I go to some trouble to ensure that I come to films fresh. This can mean swerving newspaper reviews, or perhaps timing my arrival in the cinema just in time for a film’s opening credits. When all else fails I have been…

Wildland

Have to confess that the only thing which drew me to this dark family melodrama was the prospect of renewing my acquaintance with Sidbe Babette Knudsen. She plays Bodil the matriarch of small but noxious crime family somewhere in provincial Denmark and she doesn’t disappoint. Maintaining the appearance of a normal loving family albeit one…

Censor

Censorship can be quite a weird concept. Until recently the Indian Board of Film Censors had an S rating. They applied this to blue movies and it meant that only members of medical professions could view the body parts on display. Like I said, weird. This film was at its strongest when it concentrated on…