Review: Rocks

***½ Made with a 75% female cast and crew, and a unique development process that began not with a script, but with a casting process that scoured East London schools for first-time actors capable of conveying the ideas and themes the filmmakers wished to explore, Rocks is certainly a film with an unconventional entry into […]

Review: Ride Your Wave

*** When 19-year-old surfer Hinako moved to a seaside town to pursue her passion, she never expected the waves to be this choppy… After a fire in her apartment complex ends with her being saved by handsome firefighter Minato, she soon falls in love, and the two begin an all-too-perfect whirlwind romance that looks like […]

Review: Days of the Bagnold Summer

**** Based on the graphic novel by writer Joff Winterheart, Days of the Bagnold Summer tells the stories of fifteen-year-old Daniel Bagnold (Earl Cave) and his mother Sue (Monica Dolan), who are forced to spend the summer holiday together after Daniel’s trip to visit his father’s new family in Florida is cancelled. The directorial debut […]

Review: Come To Daddy

**** The screen is black. Onto it appears a quote: ‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children’ – William Shakespeare. Beat. Another quote: ‘There’s no-one like my daddy’ – Beyoncé. It’s a bold opening, and one that effectively sets the tone for a film so full of dark, offbeat humour […]

Review: Vivarium

***½ When young couple Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) set out in search of a new home, it’s safe to say they did not expect to wind up playing house with a strange alien child. Trapped in a picture-perfect neighbourhood full of identical houses with no hope of escape but the promise of […]

Review: Moffie

**½ South Africa, 1981. Caught in a border war with communist Angola, the government demands every white man over the age of 16 take up arms to defend the Apartheid regime. One of those men is young Nicholas Van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), a quiet young man that doesn’t fit the mould of the […]

Review: Calm With Horses

*** In rural Ireland, a man is at war with himself. Ex-boxer Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) is no stranger to violence, having retired after an accidental death in the ring and spending his post-retirement life as an enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. But when he is asked to kill for the first time, […]

Review: And Then We Danced

***** Considering the controversy it caused in its home country of Georgia, one would think Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced would be something crude, hurtful, or provocative, not a moving coming-of-age romance. But sadly, even now there are those who find nothing more offensive than the existence of romantic love between men. Thankfully, the […]

Manga Madness: City Hunter (1993)

* Beginning its serialisation way back in 1985 and ending in the early nineties, Tsukasa Hojo’s City Hunter is a classic manga that hasn’t entirely aged well. The series has never received a full official release in English, and considering its near-constant barrage of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, perhaps it is for the best if […]

Review: Parasite

**** The Kim family can’t seem to catch a break. Destitute and living in a semi-basement apartment, Ki-taek Kim (Kang-ho Song), his wife Chung-sook (Hyae-jim Chang), and both their adult children are unable to find stable work in a jobs market where, as Ki-taek says, 500 graduates are competing for a simple driver’s job. Their […]