Film reviews and more
★★☆☆☆ Take care to not place too much hope into the misery-inducing yet somehow star-studded caper Kidnapping Freddy Heineken (2015). It’s a head-scratcher of a flick if only for the fact that viewers will spend the duration of the film […]
★★★☆☆ There’s often an unfortunate tug-of-war going on beneath the surface of films made primarily with a social agenda in mind and by those who care deeply about the subject. Taking 2013’s No Fixed Abode as an example, its cause […]
★★★☆☆ Even for a Nazi, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a monumentally unattractive person. With his pencil neck, his weak watery eyes, his Touché Turtle expression of prissy blandness, a less convincing example of Hitler’s theories of racial superiority would be […]
★★★★☆ There’s a precipice that lies just out of frame throughout James Napier Robertson’s absorbing drama, The Dark Horse (2014). It represents different things to different characters, but they are all skirting its edge precariously, lending an air of danger […]
★★★★★ Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi Blade Runner (1982) begins with a dazzling yet hellish vision of a metropolis shrouded in smog so thick that the sun has disappeared from the sky. Is it day or is it night? Giant towers […]
★★★☆☆ The central victory of Ron Mann’s fond portrait of the maverick American filmmaker Robert Altman is how personal he manages to make it. For a documentary about a director with such a strong authorial voice, it seems only fitting […]
★★★★☆ Upon its initial release in 1932, Raymond Bernard’s early-sound war film, Wooden Crosses was hailed as one of the masterpieces of cinema. Since then, it has largely been overlooked in wider discussion of the genre which is a shame, […]
★★★☆☆ Christopher Nolan continues to demand viewers to stretch their minds as well as their attention spans in his recent addition to an already impressive oeuvre with Interstellar (2014). It is a film that poses to its viewers the simple […]
★★★☆☆ John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), reissued this week for 50th anniversary celebrations, is at once a time capsule piece and an oddly prescient fable about vacuous, ephemeral celebrity which remains tartly relevant in 2015. It is perhaps best remembered as […]
★★★☆☆ Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) is a ferociously dark, hilarious ride that doesn’t just mock the corruption and social injustices of modern day Argentina, but also deeply relishes the resort to vigilante violence. His six vignettes’ over-the-top bursts of […]
★★★☆☆ Over a decade on from its first big screen outing, enduringly popular cartoon character Spongebob SquarePants returns to cinemas. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015) is a prequel to the previous film and sees SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) […]
★★★★☆ Rob Brown’s Sixteen (2013) is a beautifully realised debut that breathes new life into British cinema’s obsession with urban thrillers, fashioning a refreshingly gentle tale of redemption in a city frequently painted as the last refuge of the lost […]