All writers

Guy Lodge

variety.com
30
articles (90 days)

Recent articles

‘The Garden We Dreamed’ Review: Powerful Mexican Migrant Drama Finds Moments of Serenity Amid Adversity
“The Garden We Dreamed” opens on a complex symphony of natural sound: layer upon layer of birdsong, insect chatter and weather-rustled foliage, all the more intensified for playing out over a virtu...
variety.com
‘A Child of My Own’ Review: Stylized Drama and Documentary Scrap Over the Truth In an Unhappy Maternity Tale
Following an awkward transition into narrative filmmaking with 2024’s fact-inspired but melodrama-leaning “In Her Place,” “A Child of My Own” sees Chilean director Maite Alberdi returning to docume...
variety.com
‘Forest High’ Review: Three Women Escape the Noise in a Beguiling Mountain Retreat of a Movie
There are no luxuries and only the most essential comforts on offer at the remote Alpine refuge where “Forest High” is set: Hot water runs just a couple of hours a day, the soup served for dinner i...
variety.com
Wim Wenders Speaks Out at Berlin Film Festival Awards Ceremony: ‘Cinema Is More Resistant to Oblivion Than the Internet’
Before commencing the presentation of the Competition prizes, Berlin Film Festival jury president Wim Wenders began proceedings with a prepared statement, responding to the controversy that has bli...
variety.com
Berlin Film Festival Awards: Sandra Hüller Wins Best Lead Performance for ‘Rose’ (Updating Live)
Karim Aïnouz’s “Rosebush Pruning,” Ilker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters” and Lance Hammer’s “Queen at Sea” are among the films hoping for gold as the 76th Berlin Film Festival wraps with tonight’s awards ...
variety.com
‘The Education of Jane Cumming’ Review: A Compelling Dramatization of the True Story Behind ‘The Children’s Hour’
Lillian Hellman’s landmark 1934 play “The Children’s Hour” has twice been adapted for the big screen, both times by director William Wyler, and neither film really did right by it. The Hays Code co...
variety.com
‘The Ballad of Judas Priest’ Review: Delightful Metal Doc Is a Rock-Solid Directorial Debut for Rage Against the Machine Guitarist Tom Morello
Some documentaries are searing exposés of the unpalatable truth and some are unashamed celebrations of a beloved subject — and if you think “The Ballad of Judas Priest,” from co-directors and Pries...
variety.com
‘Flies’ Review: Family Crisis Disrupts a Woman’s Solitude in Fernando Eimbcke’s Lovely, Lingering Charmer
It’s a reliable arthouse rule of thumb that putting any scrappily appealing kid in the path of any sour, set-in-their-ways adult character will eventually yield a thaw — and, if the filmmakers get ...
variety.com
‘Nina Roza’ Review: An Eerily Doubled, Intricately Mirrored and Deeply Moving Reflection on Immigrant Identity
The immigrant experience is most often discussed, and most easily understood, as one of an entire person’s movement and relocation: a journey from A to B and perhaps further letters, with concomita...
variety.com
‘The Blood Countess’ Review: A Hilarious Isabelle Huppert Fully Puts the Vamp Into Vampire
Whether saturating entire frames or dribbling down a rare contrasting design element, there’s red everywhere you look in “The Blood Countess,” as you might well expect. Little of it, however, is th...
variety.com
‘At the Sea’ Review: Amy Adams’ Commitment Can’t Save a Recovery Drama as Immediately Forgettable as Its Title
Drop the definite article and you have a more apt title for “At the Sea,” a drab and laborious recovery drama with a mystifying amount of major-league talent behind it. The second English-language ...
variety.com
‘We Are All Strangers’ Review: Anthony Chen Completes a Singaporean Trilogy With a Protracted but Poignant Family Melodrama
Two weddings, held in relatively quick succession, encapsulate the social, economic and generational tensions driving “We Are All Strangers.” The first, between two bright-eyed only-just-adults, is...
variety.com
‘Rose’ Review: Sandra Hüller Amazes, Again, in Markus Schleinzer’s Immaculately Controlled Tale of Gender Privilege
While jumping through the hoops of her first U.S. awards season two years ago for “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest,” it must have amused Sandra Hüller to be labeled a “breakthrough per...
variety.com
‘Salvation’ Review: The Roots of Violence Are Explored in Emin Alper’s Tense, Atmosphere Study of a Massacre
How do you justify the unjustifiable? How do you get to the point where you feel morally in the right while you slaughter unarmed men, women and children? These are the questions director Emin Alpe...
variety.com
‘Nightborn’ Review: Rupert Grint and Seidi Haarla Headline an Effective Blend of Finnish Mythology and Cronenbergian Horror
Motherhood can be… a lot, as both Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” reminded us last year. Now, here comes a riposte in the horror genre: Hanna Bergholm...
variety.com
‘Rosebush Pruning’ Review: Callum Turner Broods on the Fringes of a Toxic Family in Karim Aïnouz’s Sleek, Silly but Seductive Provocation
When the time came for Karim Aïnouz to direct his first English-language feature a few years ago, few would have bet on it being “Firebrand.” A historical drama based on the life of Henry VIII surv...
variety.com
‘Dao’ Review: French-Senegalese Master Alain Gomis Builds a Swirling, Ecstatic Family Epic From One Wedding and a Funeral
“Dao” opens with onscreen text defining its title as “a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world” — one way to articulate that famously intangible, widely trav...
variety.com
‘A Prayer for the Dying’ Review: Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly Anchor an Impressively Severe End-of-Days Western
The rolling grasslands of Slovakia stand in for the plains of 19th-century Wisconsin in “A Prayer for the Dying,” though the spiritual setting of Dara Van Dusen’s unforgiving western lies in some r...
variety.com
‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ Review: An Aching Jazz Biopic Played With a Delicate Pianissimo Touch
The jazz piano of Bill Evans was characterized by grace and poise, a lightness of touch yielding a plaintive depth of feeling, that belied a life beset with chaos and tragedy. It would be easy for ...
variety.com
‘Master’ Review: Gripping Bangladeshi Drama Tells a Universal Story of Political Machinery Corrupting Socialist Aims
There are, presumably, some well-meaning civilians who have entered politics and found the experience nothing but societally beneficial and personally character-improving — but few to none of them ...
variety.com
‘Variations on a Theme’ Review: A Woman Stares at Goats — and Looks Back on a Life — in Lovely, Lyrical Rotterdam Winner
On a faintly misty morning in South Africa’s Kamiesberg mountain region, 79-year-old goatherd Hettie (Hettie Farmer) watches her flock as they hobble and nibble along the rough, khaki-colored lands...
variety.com
‘Moonglow’ Review: Isabel Sandoval Slumps With an Atmospheric but Soporific Filipino Noir
Ever since Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s luxuriantly lengthy “Drive My Car” waited until after a 40-minute prologue to announce itself on screen, the late title-card drop has become a mark of the sophisticat...
variety.com
‘Butterfly’ Review: An Oddball Comedy-Drama That Loads Renate Reinsve With Even More Estranged-Parent Issues
A potentially tranquil desert island now overrun with vacationing Europeans chugging day-glo cocktails, Gran Canaria is an intrinsically funny setting for a story of familial grief, disconnection a...
variety.com
‘Saccharine’ Review: A Grisly Body-Image Body Horror for the Age of Weight Loss Meds
Fast weight-loss methods have never been easier or more readily available, but they come at a cost — and for the young, dangerously experimenting protagonist of “Saccharine,” that’s higher and more...
variety.com
‘Rock Springs’ Review: Kelly Marie Tran Stars in an Atmospheric Ghost Story of Literally Unearthed Atrocities
In “Rock Springs,” a newly widowed, grief-addled mother moves with her young daughter to a creaky, remote cottage in the woods of Wyoming, which, as anyone even casually versed in horror cinema wil...
variety.com
‘Frank & Louis’ Review: Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan Give Immaculate Performances in a Stoically Moving Story of Prison Care
Life behind bars means death behind bars, and all the pain and frailty that often precedes it — a fate that awaits a good number of America’s incarcerated millions, though one we rarely see discuss...
variety.com
‘The Musical’ Review: A Middle-School Drama Teacher Certainly Brings the Drama in an Off-Kilter Comedy
For those of us who saw it when we were still in school ourselves, Alexander Payne’s “Election” was a startling work, and even a perspective-shifting one — a snarlingly funny introduction to the id...
variety.com
‘The Shitheads’ Review: Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. are Losers on a Mission in a Broad Comedy Tinged with Viciousness
There’s an instance of unforeseen violence a third of the way into “The Shitheads,” Macon Blair’s latest blood-soaked tragicomedy, that could almost lose the audience given the starkness of the ton...
variety.com
‘Zi’ Review: Kogonada Changes Course for a Small, Slight, Beautiful Journey
Light and shimmery and intricately formed as a dandelion clock, Kogonada’s 2017 debut “Columbus” walked a fine tonal line between poetic and prosaic, intellect and feeling, all without slipping int...
variety.com
‘One in a Million’ Review: A Poignant, Decade-Spanning Portrait of a Syrian Refugee Caught Between Two Ideas of Home
When you’ve only lived for a decade, the next one stretches ahead of you like an apparent eternity. To the elders raising you, it goes by in the blink of an eye. Docmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacIn...
variety.com