★★★☆☆ Has there ever been a pop culture phenomenon more endlessly discussed, analysed or obsessed over than Star Wars? Amongst its ever-expanding universe of spin offs, sequels, and relentless fandom, it’s difficult to imagine a new way of looking at […]
★★★☆☆ Drone warfare is widely condemned on the basis of its relative safety and detachment from the horrors of combat. If you’re going to kill someone, you should at least have the steel to look them in the eye while […]
★★★★☆ On the surface, Anne Fontaine’s latest film The Innocents seems to have a lot in common with Pawel Pawlikowski’s recent masterpiece Ida. Both take place in convents in post-World War II Poland, and both feature the familiar imagery of […]
★★★★★ It’s a question posed by international relations scholars and armchair strategists alike: if aliens were to invade earth, would we finally learn to get along? In Arrival, Denis Villeneuve ventures an answer and proves himself a master innovator of […]
★★☆☆☆ Ewan McGregor’s decision to begin his directorial career with an adaptation of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral was nothing if not ambitious. Roth’s novel is the kind of densely-layered opus about the fictions of the American Dream that […]
★★☆☆☆ Director Jim O’Hanlan takes us down many different London roads in 100 Streets, attempting to encompass the multiple criss-crossing tales of his debut feature’s diverse ensemble. Working from the first script by local screenwriter Leon Butler, the capital’s wide-ranging […]
★★☆☆☆ Bryan Singer effectively kick-started the modern comic book movie era in 2000. Sure, Batman was being decimated by Joel Schumacher in the late 1990s and Wesley Snipes made his debut as Blade in 1998, but it was Singer’s X-Men […]
★★★★☆ Aside from the furore surrounding Ken Loach’s latest Palme d’Or winning polemic on the inhumanities of the British welfare system, I, Daniel Blake, the re-release of his iconic 1969 drama Kes is a chance to explore a more poetic […]
★★☆☆☆ For its many faults, Imperium has noble intentions. Inspired by incendiary true-to-life events, its narrative charts an undercover FBI operation to expose a plague of nationwide racial hatred, white supremacist groups and an impending terrorist act on Washington DC. […]
Despite being a nation with an illustrious cinema heritage, Czech Republic is not a country that is especially well served by modern distributors in the UK. Their rich history is continually mined for brilliant home entertainment releases by the likes […]
★★★☆☆ The most terrifying lesson of Anthony Baxter’s 2011 documentary You’ve Been Trumped wasn’t the warning about the behaviour of the bully-boy billionaire business man Donald Trump, but rather the terrifying acquiescence of state players, police and politicians in facilitating […]
★★★☆☆ In the two and a half decades since his first feature film Slackers debuted at New Directors/New Films in New York, Richard Linklater has built an unlikely career out of humility and driven artistic ambition. Choosing to remain in […]
