Dark Match had its world première at Fantasia 2024; first published by SciFiNow Pro wrestling is a peculiarly paradoxical art. On the one hand it is all showmanship and fakery, its bouts choreographed, its punches held, its outcomes fixed; while on the other hand, its practitioners have the kind of genuine talent and toughness which…
One Spoon of Chocolate had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 8 June “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” go the famous words of President Theodore Roosevelt – words that would become literalised in the true story of Buford Pusser, an ex-wrestler who decided, as sheriff, to curb rampant crime and corruption in McNairy…
“I’m just a movie guy, I don’t know much about sports,” says old video store clerk Hank of the coming basketball game between local lovable losers the Warriors and LA’s all-star the Lakers, where the outcome seems a foregone conclusion (“we definitely cannot beat LA”). He then launches into a speech on the wish-fulfilment paradigms provided…
Australia first published by Film4 Summary: Following his ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’, poly-hyphenate Baz Luhrmann turns to national epic, in an optimistic tale of adventure, romance, war and racial reconciliation Down Under. Review: Way back in 1915 when D.W. Griffiths made his Civil War and Reconstruction epic The Birth of a Nation, he may have been expanding…
Patrycja Kepa and Acoryé White’s debut feature opens with two prologues, one short, one long – and both connected by the old trinket box of the title. In the first, a figure in white gloves and baseball cap thoroughly cleans out a house (decorated with photographs of a mixed-race couple) and carefully restores a discarded…
Accused had its world première at The Overlook Film Festival 2023 Whether with his crime drama Villain (2020) or his single-take kitchen thriller Boiling Point (2021), actor turned director Philip Barantini has proven expert at staging simmering tensions in contemporary Britain. Accordingly, even though his latest feature Accused concerns a witch-hunt, it is set not…
We have all seen it in those videos that regularly surface showing a racist attack, say in a subway or on a public bus. An individual or gang singles out a person of colour to subject to a bombardment of racial slurs or worse in front of a captive audience. Maybe a third party intervenes,…
In Swan View, on the eastern outskirts of Perth where the boundaries between city and bush are ill-defined, the corpse of 18-year-old Tracey Myers has been found. Tracey is the Laura Palmer of Western Australian suburbia – a high school girl who had her whole future ahead of her, but also a junkie on a…
Blindfire opens with text claiming that it is “based on actual events”, and an audio recording of a distressed man on a 911 call threatening to kill his own wife at his Los Angeles home address – which he duly supplies over the line. We then cut to LAPD officer Nika Wilkins (Sharon Leal) mocking…
“I can’t breathe,” 19-year-old Talib Ben Hassi (Jack Pedersen) shouts repeatedly, as police officers hold him down in a cell. With those three words right at the beginning of Shorta, writer/directors’ Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm evoke the phrase used by Eric Garner and many other African-Americans before they died at the hands of…
Just Mercy first published by Sight & Sound, February 2020 (here modified) Review: Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy takes place in Monroeville, Alabama – also the birthplace of author Harper Lee and the setting for her 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird. In the film, locals seem confused, referring to Lee’s lawyer protagonist Atticus Finch…