As bestas (2022) starts with a slow-motion shot of Galician farmers wrestling horses to the ground. A foreboding orchestral soundtrack accompanies the image, calling to a dark side of humanity. The violently forceful and controlling. A title pops up with a statement that sounds reasonable, but doesn’t quite jibe. It…

A few months ago I went to see Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love — a non-fiction feature about Katia and Maurice Krafft, narrating over mesmerising lava footage from the French volcanologists’ archives. Its dramatic footage, fascinating facts about one of Earth’s most awesome natural features, and focus on the joyful…

When you watch a movie in el cine, it can morph subtly before your eyes, surround your senses, capture your interest, and pull you in when you don’t expect it. Living is not a great movie, but it offers a great movie-viewing experience. For the first half hour I was…

Martin McDonagh’s last movie was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, released more than five years ago. It did great at the box office, won a sweep of awards, and was critically well received, so the gap between it and The Banshees of Inisherin seems surprising. McDonagh is a director who…

Babylon is 3 hours and 9 minutes long, and would need to be 60 minutes to work. Could it be 60 minutes? Nope. No feature-length film could be. And the way this one shows such an over-sized world, and takes time to saunter and hang-out there, there is no Earthly…

Writer/director Parker Finn’s debut feature is a curse/demonic possession movie (in that order, with possession playing a subservient role in the narrative) with primary themes of mental health, trauma, and the cycle of abuse. The plot concerns Rose Cotter (played by Sosie Bacon), a cynical-minded psychiatrist who treats a new…

The cinema industry is doing poorly, and buying some food and a drink with your ticket is the best way to support them. That’s where the profits are for the cinema people. I used to smuggle in half-bottles of whisky with friends, and mix them with cinema-bought drinks. The cinemas…

Great documentaries don’t come along that often. A year without at least one superb fictional film released, destined to be recognised as great once the dust settles, is a strange year. Often, there’s a handful. With non-fiction, truly great films, that stand the test of time, arrive on a slower…

Navalny prompted me to stop what I was doing, and write about it with a sense of urgency. I love when that happens. It is a documentary with impact. It leaves you feeling clear about things that can’t just be looked up on Google, or consumed through social media. For…