Sight & Sound

Pacific Rim: Uprising review – John Boyega adds fettle to the metal

This slow-coming sequel does indeed uprise on Guillermo del Toro’s bland robots-and-monsters original thanks to a less belligerent attitude to plot and human characterisation, offers Kim Newman.

Friday 23 March 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Courting the impossible: The Task and Bisbee ’17 at True/False 2018

A first visit to the True/False festival means stepping on to enjoyably shaky ground. Two films at this year’s event in particular offered a destabilised and fascinating view of cinematic reality, writes Irina Trocan.

Wednesday 21 March 2018

Festivals

Film of the week: The Square artfully exposes hidden injustice

Ruben Östlund’s museum-set satire contrasts the prestige of high culture with the thankless work of helping people, with unpredictably uncomfortable results, writes Violet Lucca.

Thursday 15 March 2018

Reviews and recommendations

The Magic Flute archive review: Ingmar Bergman does Mozart with gusto

The Swedish director’s filmed staging of the classic opera is back in cinemas. On its first release in 1975 Peter Cowie hailed it as a witty, rumbustious production saturated with childlike joy.

Friday 16 March 2018

Reviews and recommendations

All tease, no tale: Hollywood’s misplaced lady lands

The dumping-to-Netflix of Alex Garland’s women-led sci-fi thriller Annihilation, like the elided matriarchies of Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and Godless, suggests that cinema’s gatekeepers still aren’t ready to see any vision of women in charge, says Charlotte Richardson Andrews.

Thursday 15 March 2018

Features

London’s Cinema Museum is keeping cinephilia alive. Can it be saved?

The threatened sale of the south London premises of the Cinema Museum would sacrifice a rare, grassroots collection of cinephile memorabilia – and a key community resource – to the forces of property speculation, write Matthew Harle and Jack Wormell.

Friday 16 March 2018

Features

Affonso Uchoa on The Hidden Tiger: “Cinema allows life to go on”

The Brazilian director’s debut film, a quasi-fictional portrait of his neighbourhood in the Brazilian city of Minas Gerais, is playing at the Chronic Youth Film Festival in London. He talks religion, James Joyce and putting his home on the cinematic map with Laura Davis.

Friday 16 March 2018

Interviews

Film of the week (1): You Were Never Really Here makes pointillist poetry from hard-boiled brutalism

The body count vies with the word count in Lynne Ramsay’s stunningly pared-down avenger noir, with a battered but unbowed Joaquin Phoenix storming the urban night, writes Kate Stables.

Monday 12 March 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Film of the week (2): Sweet Country, a landmark Aboriginal western

Warwick Thornton upends The Searchers with this deftly shaded and powerful account of the hunting of an indigenous couple wanted for the murder of a white man in the 1920s Australian outback, writes Jason Anderson.

Monday 12 March 2018

Reviews and recommendations

Margaret Salmon in the round

Tramway Glasgow’s retrospective of 20 years of the trans-Atlantic artist’s movies brings together her major works, minor and marginalia, and even a live performance of 2017’s Mm, into a marvellous whole, says Matt Turner.

Saturday 10 March 2018

Festivals

Steady on the wing: how Ramia Suleiman completed Leonard Retel Helmrich’s The Long Season

Filming life in a Lebanese refugee camp for displaced Syrian families, single-shot cinema master Leonard Retel Helmrich needed a like-skilled female collaborator to shoot where he couldn’t. Come the edit, he suffered a heart attack. Ramia Suleiman tells Sophie Brown how she filled the breach.

Friday 9 March 2018

Interviews

Tea, toast and tingles: Phantom Thread for ASMR lovers

The noises that infuriate Daniel Day-Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock provoke an entirely different reaction in the online ASMR community of soothing noise fans, discovers Sara Bivigou.

Monday 5 March 2018

Features

Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s fascination with female experience and emotions underpinned one of the cinema’s greatest virtual communities of women on screen. In this video study Leigh Singer invites Bergman’s talented actresses and their creations into closest possible correspondence.

Friday 2 February 2018

Video

In her eyes: notes on Gloria Grahame (a video essay)

With a curl of her lip and an arch of her eyebrow, Gloria Grahame was the actress who stood up to both Humphrey Bogart and Lee Marvin in their most violent roles. In this video essay, Serena Bramble explores the burn mark Grahame left on the silver screen.

Friday 24 November 2017

Video

Wrapped in plasticity: Twin Peaks’ myriad Laura Palmers

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin conduct a forensic examination of the slippages at play in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surrealistic investigative series.

Friday 28 April 2017

Video

Video essay: What is neorealism?

kogonada pits the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind on the same movie material.

Friday 17 May 2013

Video