• Little Women

    January 3, 2020 - By 

    Grab the green bin. Greta Gerwig’s dropped in one last gift. Little Women, the seventh cinematic (re)telling of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved novel, is a perfect film for the dark, weird, listless days that trot along right behind Christmas. It’s Gerwig’s third directorial effort, and the second time she’s written and directed, after the slow-burn brilliance of 2017’s Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan’s best movie). The ensemble domestic drama follows the troubles and triumphs of the March’s, a contented but economically limited household in Civil War-era Massachusetts, as four sisters and their mother await their pastor patriarch’s return from the conflict,…

  • Lady Macbeth

    May 4, 2017 - By 

    Like a tightly wound corset ready to explode, Lady Macbeth is masterfully controlled period piece with a rebellious, cruel heart. Based on Nikolai Leslov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, which imagined Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of the Scottish king’s much-maligned wife and cheerleader, the film applies its own interpretative reorientation to 19th-century England’s landed gentry, a social world the English imagination clings to in dusty, wistful, National Heritage nostalgic, a cosy image of class harmony imminently worthy of subversion (the film has been called an ‘anti-Downton Abbey‘). Lady Macbeth is a bold and confident debut work from screenwriter Alice Birch…