This felt incredibly tame to me. As with the directors previous film Bodies Bodies Bodies, I felt as a director and writer she had next to nothing to say about the subject matter. How can you make a film about taboo sex and power dynamics and not take any real risks. She seems to be a director that is drawn to the idea of risk and power and sex, but only at a surface level. It’s all just very vanilla…

I love it when a great horror film comes out of nowhere and surprises me. It’s been a poor year or two for horror, so it was such a relief to watch a film that was able to give me full-body chills not once but twice! This also really spoke to me as I realised early on (from a sign in the oddities shop) that it’s set in Bantry in Ireland, which is where my mother is from and where…

I have slightly mixed feelings on this, just about landing on the positive side.
Its strength and weakness is its imagery. So much focus appears to have been placed on crafting the perfect image that no time appears to have been spent on trying to infuse it with deeper meaning. So often I was sitting there appreciating the blocking and framing, while not feeling particularly scared or disturbed. For me there is only one genuinely disturbing scene in the film…

This was an incredible experience in IMAX. I think I’ve written about Dunkirk before, saying that it didn’t click with me on my first watch. It was only after hearing Quentin Tarantino talk about his experience of really connecting with it on rewatches that I decided to give it another go, and was then blown away by it myself on a rewatch at home.
This was an even more incredible experience in IMAX, and it felt particularly interesting and satisfying…

I generally manage to avoid the wider ‘cultural conversation’ around new films until I’ve seen them. In this case, I had noticed two interesting threads in the lead up to release. The first was a bizarre turn against Alex Garland from critics and film lovers / writers / podcasters etc. In the blink of an eye he seems to have gone from a beloved filmmaker and writer to a sort of figure of ridicule. And not a single piece of…

What a deeply special film. This might overtake First Cow as my favourite Reichardt so far.
She’s so good at underplaying scenes that most other directors would over complicate. A lot of it is in the editing, the cuts between faces, and the ability to continuously see comedy and tragedy as two sides of the same coin. She’s a master of little moments that mean a lot, multiple contrasting emotions. Laura Dern’s facial expressions every time Jared Harris speaks, Michelle…