Screen Rats

I t’s often the silence in the absence of vocalized emotion or explanation that speaks loudest in the works of Tsai-Ming Liang. The silence of the final loyal patrons …

C hristmas time in the late 1990s: a family and friends sit around the kitchen of a council flat somewhere in south London. Val, played by the great Kathy Burke , is t…

W hen people think about Disney, the first things leaping to mind tend to be princesses, superheroes, or Jedi knights. But a corporate behemoth with such deep pockets …

W riter/director Park Hoon-jung goes back before moving forward. The Witch: Part 2 – The Other One (Manyeo 2: Lo go) may begin with a little girl in a barn, covered in…

W hen famous singer Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) asks her new bodyguard Frank Farmer (Kevin Costner) to accompany her on an evening out, he takes her to see his fav…

C oyness often gets in the way of people dying a good death. Few know how to talk about dying – this discomfort is reflected on a small scale in everyday discourse thr…

W u Ma’s The Dead and the Deadly (Ren xia ren) opens abruptly. Having witnessed a man stealing into a woman’s home not a day after her husband has died, Brother Chu (S…

B y reputation, Casablanca is the greatest American romance ever put to celluloid. There may be films more avant-garde or technically accomplished, but no film is so c…

D omestic workers live at the fringes of other people’s realities, devoting their bodies and souls to rather thankless jobs. Often they are from developing nations, le…

I t’s approaching two decades since Rian Johnson announced himself as one of genre cinema’s most intriguing young talents. His debut feature, Brick, a high-stakes high…

T he young life of competitive swimmer Yusra Mardini feels custom wrapped for some canny director to waltz in and produce a glossy, inspirational film about her unlike…

T here was a time when being called a “disruptor” was not a nice thing. If you talked too much in class, played your music too loud, or drunkenly tipped over cows whil…

S he Said opens with a pale young woman with cropped hair walking along the Irish coast. To her astonishment an 18th century galleon is suddenly revealed, bustling wit…