The opening minutes of Encounter prepare you for a science-fiction adventure. A meteor hurtling through space enters the Earth’s atmosphere and casts a streak of light over a suburban American town. Like a latter-day Roy Neary, the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, former marine Malik Khan (the ever-watchable Riz Ahmed) is on a singular mission: to take his two young … Continue reading Encounter – Review
There is a wonderful visual joke early in Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania’s sophomore feature, The Man Who Sold His Skin. A truck filled with check-patterned laundry bags pulls up and out climbs man-on-the-run Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) wearing a shirt with the same pattern. For a brief moment I was transported back to the ZAZ (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker) comedies of the 1980s, Airplane, Top Secret and … Continue reading The Man Who Sold His Skin – Review
Few actors can play a self-satisfied bastard as well as Aidan Gillen. As the unscrupulous Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in the HBO series Game of Thrones, he had television viewers cringe at his every insincere utterance. In Rose Plays Julie, his third collaboration with the writer-director team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, he is cast as an unpleasant, full-of-himself archaeologist, Peter. I’d like to imagine that … Continue reading Rose Plays Julie – Review
It is easy to spend too much time on social media. You are in the middle of something, decide to glance at your feed through your phone and then get sucked in, liking, commenting or just unburdening. You need to have a job that prevents distraction or else keep the darned thing switched off – to heck with FOMO. Sweat, Swedish writer-director Magnus von Horn’s … Continue reading Sweat – Review
After his feature debut, Another Earth and follow-up, I-Origins, writer-director Mike Cahill struggled for a high-concept title for his third feature, apologetically named Bliss. It tells the story of a newly divorced middle-ranking executive, Greg Wittle (an apologetic Owen Wilson) who fails to re-order his meds, loses his job, kills his boss and meets a stranger in a bar in rapid succession. Greg is summoned … Continue reading Bliss – Review
Over the last few years, we have been treated to American movies that have focussed on the wives or girlfriends of career criminals. Generally though, films such as Widows or The Kitchen have shown groups of women associated with crime getting together to prove that they are better than their deadbeat husbands, even if they are played by Liam Neeson. Set in Pittsburgh in the … Continue reading I’m Your Woman – Review
Movies on Weekends 