New Movies

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Kelly Reichardt’s films are beautifully crafted poetic pieces feature unusual stories about unusual people. By her own admission, her films are “glimpses of people passing through”. Reichardt’s painstakingly long takes and repetitive quotidian scenes are what makes her productions into masterpieces of modern cinema. The Night Moves’ director is back with another understated study of rural America with the critically acclaimed Certain Women. The film, which won Best Film at last year’s London Film Festival is...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel It’s easy to get carried away thinking of films as art, but sometimes it’s just a job. Southern Fury highlights this point, rounding up Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and Adrien Grenier, all of whom can surely only be in this dire thriller for the paycheck. Lacking just about all the ingredients required to make something watchable; Steven C. Miller’s film has to fall back on Cage in a ridiculous wig and fake nose to find any...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Tomato red is almost the colour of Jamalee Merridew’s hair, and it’s the name of the Daniel Woodrell novel from which this film is adapted. Woodrell has written nine novels to date, a number of them set in the bleak forgotten lands of the Ozarks; mountainous country crossing over Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. There’s clearly something cinematic about his work because two previous novels became the excellent Ride with the Devil (1999) and Winter’s Bone (2010)....

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Massimo is a man who should have it all. He lives in a world of elegant apartments and swanky parties before heading out to fashion shows, football games, and war zones, the varied diet that comes with his journalism job. Yet for a man living such an interesting life, he’s not actually lived a single minute of it. Sweet Dreams is a surface deep attempt to show how childhood trauma can destabilise everything that follows. Marco...

It is easy to get caught up in the annual awards coverage and forget that entries are films, and not just news stories. Articles surrounding Hidden Figures have placed a large emphasis on its diverse cast and how it is somehow an antidote to the failings of last year’s nominations. All this attention seems rather unfair, as it ignores the merits and qualities that are on display in this film. Set in 1960s Virginia, where racism and sexism were generally...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain With a McDonald’s seemingly in every town centre and motorway service centre in the world it’s hard to imagine a time before the fast-food chain. Whether in the small island of Réunion off Madagascar or the Negev Desert in Israel you know the familiar burger and fries is never too far away. Over the last 60 years, McDonald’s has not just become one the world’s most recognisable and ironic products, but has also come to feed...

In Prevenge, Alice Lowe revisits the familiar grisly kill territory of Ben Wheatley’s brilliantly understated film Sightseers, which she co-wrote and starred in alongside Steve Oram. Directed, written and starring Lowe herself in the principle role, Prevenge is a hilarious black comedy charting the adventures of a heavily pregnant woman on a remorseless killing spree. Despite lacking the perfectionist skills of Laurie Rose’s exquisite cinematography, the film has a similar narrative tone to Sightseers and deals with similar themes of...

Set in Pittsburg in the 1950s and adapted from August Wilson’s 1983 award-winning play of the same name, Fences is the third feature from Denzel Washington in his directorial guise. The play was part of a bigger body of work titled The Pittsburgh Cycle which charters black lives across the decades of the 20th century. The film has been one the most long awaited projects of the last 30 years. After winning the Pulitzer prize in 1987, the play was...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP It must be hard enough to write, direct, and star in a film at the best of times, so I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Alice Lowe to do all these things while heavily pregnant. Prevenge has a simple but interesting premise. Ruth, a pregnant women, is convinced her unborn child is not only speaking to her, but requesting her to commit a string of murders. In between these episodes there...