★★★☆☆ Standing in front of a mirror, a man repeats the phrase, “I have never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.” His intonation and inflection changes but his eyes remain piercing, emotionless and glacially cold. Pauses for effect are added, differing facial expressions are selected, each one conveying a slightly altered Continue Reading
★☆☆☆☆ A prequel to J.M. Barrie’s beloved Peter Pan, Joe Wright’s Pan (2015) takes the audience back to the war-torn 1940s before young Peter (Levi Miller) became the boy everyone knows him to be. Locked up in an orphanage where his mother left him as a baby, Peter (Levi Miller) Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ There were few films at Cannes this year with as strange a central premise Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English language offering The Lobster (2015), written with his long-standing collaborator Efthymis Filippou. Bearing the macabre tone of his previous works Dogtooth (2008) and Alps (2011), Lanthimos plants the audience in a Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by werewolf movies.” Okay, wrong Howl perhaps, but aside from An American Werewolf in London (1981) and the genre-twisting The Company of Wolves (1984), the werewolf has probably been the patchiest movie monster to prowl the cinema. Since Lon Chaney Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ French icon Catherine Deneuve graces our screens once again in Pierre Salvadori’s Dans la Cour (2014), a delicate Parisian tragicomedy about a community in an upmarket Parisian apartment block. Dark and emotionally complex, it still offers moments of eccentric silliness. French TV comedian Gustave Kervern stars as Antoine, a Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Adam Sandler’s still profitable career has been in decline in recent years with one critical admonishment after another. This downturn might just be momentarily halted thanks to Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015), a modestly charming sequel that’s also the best thing Sandler has lent his name to in Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ As gorgeous to behold as Crimson Peak (2015) often is, Guillermo del Toro’s latest film has zero dramatic gravitas. It’s pop-up book Gothic, rather than a full-bodied recreation of dreamlike exotic weirdness. As a doom-filled romance, it doesn’t pass muster because the characters, no matter how excellently played by Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ 1967’s Six-Day War provides the setting for Censored Voices (2015), an arresting oral account of the conflict from the mouths of soldiers fresh from the battlefield; though one that never pushes its subject as far as it might. In a similar vein to recent docs like Liz Garbus’ Love, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ There’s a scene halfway through Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s harrowing novel Beasts of No Nation (2015) – currently in select cinemas and on Netflix from 16 October – where a mother and her daughter are dragged from their hiding places, raped and killed while our protagonist Agu Continue Reading