★★★★
By the time the opening titles of Loving Vincent come to a close, and the film itself begins, somewhere in the region of 1500 hand painted oil canvases, produced by professional artists and animators over the equivalent of perhaps 15-20 months will have glanced and glimmered across the screen. The result is, simply put, astonishing.
★★★
There were two available avenues down which The Glass Castle, Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ likewise-titled memoir, could have traveled. On the one hand, a ‘glass castle’ is symbolically suggestive of fragility, insecurity and hollow grandeur; on the other, it is a image that conjures nostalgic ideas of the fairytale ‘far, far away’s of childhood tales. In hindsight, it is a shame that Cretton leant to the latter. His Glass Castle is a film of many isolated successes, which are sadly let down a misjudged and inconsistent tone.
★★★
Breathe isn’t quite the film you’d expect to mark the directorial debut of Imaginarium’s Doctor Parnassus himself, Andy Serkis. That would probably be his sophomore turn at the helm of next year’s motion capture spectacular The Jungle Book. Instead, this technologically quieter biopic is driven not by ambition so much as pure and genuine heart. Though not so remarkable as the story it tells, Breathe makes for a winning watch that leaves you both heartbroken and entirely affirmed.
The Film Blog 