Reviews by Andrew Robertson

Order by: Date, A–Z

• 
  God's Got His Head In The Clouds (2012)

  Review preview for God's Got His Head In The Clouds

  This is a thing that is beautifully composed.

  A small girl challenges God over what she considers to be His dishonest behaviour.
• 
  God Is In The Roots (2012)

  Review preview for God Is In The Roots

  There are lines, but they are blurry, hypnotically so.

  An actress recounts a strange journey through the Amazon.
• 
  The Golden Bird (2011)

  Review preview for The Golden Bird

  The fox that befriends our protagonist is quite an ominous fox.

  A boy who pursues a mysterious golden bird finds himself further and further from the world he thought he knew.
• 
  Goldstone (2016)

  Review preview for Goldstone

  This is psychogeography, a place outback and beyond, where licit and illicit and moral and immoral are buried in shades of grey.

  An indigenous detective arrives in a frontier town on the hunt for a missing person.
• 
  Go Home (2015)

  Review preview for Go Home

  A film that is confident in visiting the past not only as flashbacks but as repercussions, relations, revelations.

  A woman returns to Lebanon and realises she has become a stranger in her own country.
• 
  Gravity (2007)

  Review preview for Gravity

  It resembles nothing more than a challenge round in a movie quiz, save that there is no obvious reward, seemingly no point.

  Examination of a screen kiss.
• 
  The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013)

  Review preview for The Great Hip Hop Hoax

  This is amazing stuff.

  The true story of a lie.
• 
  The Green Inferno (2013)

  Review preview for The Green Inferno

  The characterisation of this verdant terra incognito is decidedly old-fashioned, like a racist grandpa who insists on holding the door for ladies.

  A group of college activists are taken hostage in the Peruvian jungle.
• 
  Green Screen Gringo (2016)

  Review preview for Green Screen Gringo

  Cinema at its most inventively audacious.

  Behind a green screen, a foreigner finds his way in an enchanting - and yet turbulent - Brazil. Where the streets are a stage for politics, art and affection, a gringo can only watch.
• 
  Guinea Pigs (2012)

  Review preview for Guinea Pigs

  For all the quality of the performances, it's the story that lets it down.

  A group of test subjects are given a new drug but things don't go quite to plan.
• 
  Guns And Talks (2001)

  Review preview for Guns And Talks

  IT has moments of striking technical virtuoisity, dense, even cryptic, plotting, and broad universal humour.

  A band of killers-for-hire attempt the perfect crime, but a detective is hot on their trail.
• 
  Gutenberg (2013)

  Review preview for Gutenberg

  Slight but entertaining.

  A tribute to John Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press in Europe.
• 
  Gypsy Cab (2009)

  Review preview for Gypsy Cab

  With sandy docklands, rusting hulks, the taxi we follow drifts through an unfathomable landscape.

  The phenomenon of the 'gypsy cab' - Russian, spontaneous, unlicensed taxis.
• 
  Habitat (2012)

  Review preview for Habitat

  There is an extant sense of mystery, perhaps trending to dread, but here it is not enough.

  The familiar becomes unfamiliar.
• 
  Half Of A Yellow Sun (2013)

  Review preview for Half Of A Yellow Sun

  A film worth shouting about.

  Civil war shatters the comfortable illusions of Nigeria’s middle class in this 1960s-set love story.
• 
  Hamdi And Maria (2007)

  Review preview for Hamdi And Maria

  Director Timor Britva has done his best to tell this story with documentary impartiality, but the situation makes that almost impossible.

  The story of two ordinary people whose lives were irrevocably transformed by the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
• 
  Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (2007)

  Review preview for Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix

  The Order Of The Phoenix is the best in the series.

  Harry Potter and friends find themselves in trouble as a mysterious stranger seizes power at Hogwarts.
• 
  Have Heart (2017)

  Review preview for Have Heart

  A treat to watch.

  A looping GIF has an existential crisis.
• 
  Heal The Living (2016)

  Review preview for Heal The Living

  Anna Dorval as the transplant's recipient, Dominique Blanc's surgeon, and Emmanuelle Seigner's turn as the mother of the donor are all note-perfect.

  Drama about lives connected by an organ transplant.
• 
  A Heart Of Love (2017)

  Review preview for A Heart Of Love

  Statements of fact cannot quite describe the film because it is something beyond text.

  The intimate relationship between two Warsaw artists.
• 
  Heavy Eyes (2011)

  Review preview for Heavy Eyes

  The sound is enveloping, excellent, a submarine hunting for its missing guitar, a synthetic-aperture-radar love-song, ambience built steadily from Jurgen Gruber's audio samples.

  An experiment in the cinematic experience of multi-layered sound.
• 
  The Henhouse (2010)

  Review preview for The Henhouse

  This is touching and excellently executed.

  A hungry fox finds shelter from the city and the rain in the Hen House Cafe.
• 
  Henry (2013)

  Review preview for Henry

  A layered portrait of what's happening around a kid, oblivious, even endangered.

  As life for his mother becomes increasingly complicated and frustrating, young Henry struggles to get his needs met.
• 
  Here, There (2011)

  Review preview for Here, There

  Beautiful in scale, in scope, each of our three major locations is lovingly rendered.

  Small intimate stories reveal three parallel worlds.
• 
  Hair Wolf (2018)

  Review preview for Hair Wolf

  Something truly delightful.

  In a black hair salon in gentrifying Brooklyn, the local residents fend off a strange new monster: white women intent on sucking the lifeblood from black culture.
• 
  Halloween Kills (2021)

  Review preview for Halloween Kills

  There is an exercise in nostalgia from the fonts in the credits that seem serif-perfect to the liberal reapplication of Carpenter's original score.

  The Halloween night when Michael Myers returned isn’t over yet.
• 
  Handbook (2021)

  Review preview for Handbook

  It takes a lot to make this kind of document. The simplest line is often the hardest.

  In the days following the presidential election in Belarus in August 2020, numerous protests erupt throughout the country.
• 
  Harbour (2017)

  Review preview for Harbour

  An exercise in the minimal.

  Two industrial painters discover a dead body in the Rotterdam harbour.
• 
  The Hardest Part (2009)

  Review preview for The Hardest Part

  Everything works in this film.

  An ageing actor finally secures the audition of a lifetime. But just how badly does he want the role?
• 
  Harold And The Purple Crayon (2024)

  Review preview for Harold And The Purple Crayon

  I was surprised to be as pleasantly surprised.

  Inside of his book, adventurous Harold can make anything come to life simply by drawing it. After he grows up and draws himself off the book's pages and into the physical world, Harold finds he has a lot to learn about real life.
• 
  Harvest (2008)

  Review preview for Harvest

  Events, as they unfold, are both shocking and satisfying.

  Two thieves break into a farm, but they're not alone.
• 
  Harvest (2024)

  Review preview for Harvest

  At times the discomfort that Harvest causes is not from dirt or despair but the room it leaves for interpretation.

  Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.
• 
  A Haunting In Venice (2023)

  Review preview for A Haunting In Venice

  It seems some alloy of leaden and brazen.

  In post-World War II Venice, Hercule Poirot, now retired and living in his own exile, reluctantly attends a séance. When one of the guests is murdered, it is up to the former detective to once again uncover the killer.
• 
  Head Over Heels (2012)

  Review preview for Head Over Heels

  Its sure-footed direction, its invention and its heart are all infatuating.

  A couple who have grown apart - geometrically - try to rekindle their relationship.
• 
  The Heart Of The Volcano (21)

  Review preview for The Heart Of The Volcano

  Fee Strothman's camera is somewhere between the dreamlike and the documentary.

  Their fate in the hands of a powerful sorcerer, by the next moon a daughter must save her father's soul.
• 
  The Heiresses (2018)

  Review preview for The Heiresses

  This film displays a deftness of touch.

  When Chiquita is sent to prison for debt, her introverted girlfriend Chela is left to her own devices. Chela offers rich women a taxi service in her old car. As she explores the outside world she also starts to focus on her own desires.
• 
  Hell Drivers (1957)

  Review preview for Hell Drivers

  Hell Drivers is a gem.

  An ex-con trucker tries to expose his boss's rackets.
• 
  Heretic (2024)

  Review preview for Heretic

  An intense pop-cultural awareness permeates Heretic. This is the doctrinal dialogue of our age.

  Two young religious women are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of a strange man.
• 
  Her Violet Kiss (2021)

  Review preview for Her Violet Kiss

  Though it is constructed about a ruin this is an unburied treasure, not a folly.

  A re-contextualised a scene from a lost silent German title, Liebeshölle.
• 
  Her Way (2021)

  Review preview for Her Way

  It's not an easy watch, but it is a good one.

  Marie worked as a sex work­er for 20 years. To ensure her son’s future, Marie wants to pay for his stud­ies. She needs mon­ey, quickly.
• 
  A Hijacking (2012)

  Review preview for A Hijacking

  Stark, beautifully observed, genuinely captivating, A Hijacking grabs its audience and does not let go.

  A brutal drama about a ship hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean and the subsequent struggles for survival and freedom.
• 
  Hoard (2023)

  Review preview for Hoard

  Hoard goes further, creeps around, becomes something you can start to smell, to taste.

  1984, London: Seven-year-old Maria and her mother live in their own loving world built on sorting through bins and collecting shiny rubbish. One night, their world falls apart, and we join Maria a decade later, living with her foster mother.
• 
  Hold Your Fire (2021)

  Review preview for Hold Your Fire

  This is a tragedy at any level. There's not just the siege but the associated mentality, a mixture of recursion, remorse, and regret.

  Reconstruction of a 1970s bungled robbery, told from different perspectives.
• 
  Home (2011)

  Review preview for Home

  This is an excellent film, rewarding audiences with a slowly crystallising sense of dread.

  Homeless acquaintances discuss the apparent disappearance of a man they know.
• 
  Home (2012)

  Review preview for Home

  Jack Northover's minimal piano score and Max Bellamy's cinematography both well serve Gleeson's two roles as director and editor.

  A documentary about moving a house.
• 
  Hooked (2011)

  Review preview for Hooked

  For all the subtlety in Alexander Stewart's script and the confidence of Henry Darke's direction it is Tyson and Dobson who make the film.

  A mixed-heritage woman falls out with her resentful white mother on a turbulent housing estate.
• 
  Hope (2026)

  Review preview for Hope

  Hope's scale and scope and delightful detail make it a banquet, if not an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  A thriller set near Korea's heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone. When a tiger is reported to have been sighted, the community is thrown into chaos
• 
  Hotel Artemis (2018)

  Review preview for Hotel Artemis

  There's effort, an electric hum, a glow, but for all the lightness and visions and torches borne and spots shone it never quite gels.

  The story of a nurse who runs a secret emergency room for injured criminals.
• 
  Hot Winter: A Film By Dick Pierre (2016)

  Review preview for Hot Winter: A Film By Dick Pierre

  Hot Winter is perhaps a cheese course - too rich and full as a digestif, not portion enough to satisfy.

  One of the first films in American cinema to address climate change was also a hardcore porno, we are told.
• 
  A House Of Dynamite (2025)

  Review preview for A House Of Dynamite

  In A House Of Dynamite the uncertainties are propulsive, what we learn unsettling. Each tick of the clock reorients our understanding of the same events.

  When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.