Film reviews and more
The good folks at Pixar have done it again. Extraordinarily, twelve years have passed since Finding Nemo won hearts and minds all over the world and long-awaited sequel Finding Dory is another sure-fire hit for the peerless production studio. Writer-director […]
★★★★☆ Success and failure are separated by the finest of margins in all competitive sport, nowhere more so than track and field athletics. British filmmaker Daniel Gordon’s enthralling, well-considered and finely-balanced sports doc The Fall takes as its centrifugal starting […]
In Rome earlier this morning, Alberto Barbera announced one of the most impressive Venice Film Festival lineups in recent years. With stiff competition from Berlin and the encroaching Toronto – which often sees Venice stripped of its North American journalists […]
★★☆☆☆ “You lose one another in a big house.” Prophetic words from the patriarch at the head of Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune. In the wake of his father’s death, Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits an enormous Copenhagen property and […]
★★★★☆ Joining other films that revel in a bygone era (Inside Llewyn Davis, On the Road et al.), Born to Be Blue is a captivating portrait of the shadowy remains of jazz musician Chet Baker. Anchored by a wistful, wincing […]
★★★★★ Like the protagonist of his film, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon has risen from humble circumstances, but with a meticulously and glowingly remastered re-release courtesy of the BFI, it looks like the film will be more resilient in the pinnacle […]
★★★★☆ Zootropolis is an absolute delight from first to last. With the kind of thought-provoking depth as seen in Inside Out, albeit not quite as emotionally stirring, it is packed full of charm, a riveting adventure and a number of […]
★★★★☆ 1967 was the year of Carry On Doctor, Quatermass and the Pit and two James Bond movies. It also saw the feature debut of acclaimed television director Kenneth Loach with Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp, fresh from his first […]
★★★★☆ In the ten-minute intro to Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film, we’re told that between 1899 and 1927 roughly 250-300 silent films were produced based on William Shakespeare’s plays. Why so many wordless productions for history’s greatest man of […]
★★★★★ The premise of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 unassailable Cold War satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is deceptively simple: Russia and the US, deadlocked in the threat of mutually-assured- destruction, are a […]
★★★☆☆ Ali and Nino marks an unexpected return to fiction filmmaking for Asif Kapadia. A tale of impossible love set against the backdrop of the First World War and the subsequent independence movement in Azerbaijan, Kapadia’s adaptation of Kurban Said’s […]
★☆☆☆☆ If you go out into the furthest reaches of Star Trek’s filmography you’ll be in for an unsettling discovery – the final frontier looks oddly familiar. It’s brightly coloured eye-bait, Jim, exactly as we know it – outpacing your […]