Review-Lite: Hong Kong Family (2023)

Teresa Mo, Tse Kwan-ho, Edan Lui and Hedwig Tam in Hong Kong Family When teenager Yeung's (Edan Lui) Chinese family gather for a winter solstice dinner everything goes disastrously wrong fracturing the family leading to eight years of estrangement and resent. However in the build-up to the winter solstice a visit from a distant cousin …

Review: Alcarràs (2023) – Waining Summer

Ainet Jounou in Alcarràs There is a almost perfect simplicity to Carla Simón's Alcarràs, a film that makes a promise in its opening moments and never detours or dodges its inevitable conclusion. It's in this self assured storytelling that writers Arnau Vilaró and Simón manage to tell a story of family that feels both unique …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 4: The 25 Best Films (10-1)

When the year started, we were coming out of a cinematic dead zone, one that didn't seem to be catching up to reality all that quickly. The upcoming blockbusters seemed dire and the selection for the first half of the year was few and far between. Although my top 10 includes one of the first …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 3: The 25 Best Films (20-11)

This section of the list goes from musicals to murder mysteries to a horror film that bucks conventions. Each is on here for the way it expounds upon its genre to add something new. This includes a romance that builds upon the novel it is based on by making a romance more about social issues …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 2: The 25 Best Films (25-21)

I recently read that while more films were released this year, the film industry won't reach the output of a pre-pandemic world until 2024 and while 2021 was one of the worst for quality cinema, 2022 has oddly found most of its successes, at least critically in the smaller films, showing that much like 2020 …

End of Year Review 2022 Part 1: The 10 Worst Films of 2022

I remember last year when I was writing my Best and Worst film lists, I lost heart talking about the best films as they were few and far between from the bad ones I had seen that year. This year the difference is vast and the films I enjoyed felt far away from the ones …