2017
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Baftas 2017: La La Land leads nominations
Announced by Dominic Cooper and Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner, this year’s Bafta nominations were revealed this morning. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land comfortably heads up the field with a huge 11 nominations, followed by Denis Villeneuve’s first contact sci-fi Arrival and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals on nine. It was a good morning for…
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DVD Review: 78/52
★★★★☆ Alexandre O. Philippe’s 78/52 tells us everything we wanted to know about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but were afraid to ask. It’s 90 minutes of riveting analysis and forensic insight into a film which truly can boast the distinction of changing genre cinema. 1960 was a seminal year for horror. Along with Hitchcock’s Psycho, audiences…
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Criterion Review: Black Orpheus
★★★★☆ Orpheus, the master musician who could charm all living things with his lyre, is the subject of Marcel Camus’ sumptuous 1959 Black Orpheus, a retelling of the Greek myth that situates the story during the Rio de Janeiro Carnival in Brazil. Breno Mello plays the eponymous Orfeu, here rendered as a tram driver with…
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DVD Review: Assault on Precinct 13
★★★★★ The siege as a narrative device runs throughout John Carpenter’s work, but nowhere is it as raw and unvarnished as Assault on Precinct 13. The premise is exquisitely simple: the inhabitants of a Los Angeles police station must survive the night under siege from rampaging gangbangers whose only goal is to murder everyone inside.…
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Do films flatter Wall Street?
From what we see of Wall Street in the movies, one would expect it to be a place overrun with workaholic men and women one Starbucks queue away from a complete mental breakdown, red-faced stock traders screaming into their cellphones, and young go-getters selling their soul for equity. The first question a lot of film…
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Film Review: Zero Days
★★★☆☆ As the ripples of Russian governmental intervention in the US elections crashed across the airwaves last week, chipping away at a stony-faced Putin and turning The Donald’s putrid mien a more embarrassed shade of orange, the faint sound of Alex Gibney’s hands wringing with polemical glee could be heard from the famed documentarian’s home.…
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Film Review: Silence
★★★★☆ God’s Will, or the lack thereof, lies at the core of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, based on the novel by the Japanese author Shûsaku Endô. It’s a contemplative, hushed tale marked with moments of violent ecstasy (in the true sense of the word), that rounds off Scorsese’s triptych of films concerning faith, following on from…
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Film Review: Passengers
★★★☆☆ If you’ve ever been stuck in an airport lounge, motorway service station or transit hub hotel, you might feel a sceptical appreciation for Passengers, the latest film from director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters, The Imitation Game). Aboard an intergalactic shuttle, powered by the incredible star power of Michael Sheen, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt and Laurence…
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Our most anticipated films of 2017
Hopefully you’ve had time in between last-minute Christmas shopping and mince pie binge to peruse our Best Films of 2016 rundown. Now that the year’s end is almost upon us – thank goodness – it’s time to present some of the film we’re most looking forward to seeing in the next twelve months. 2017 sees…
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The best films of 2016
For vast swathes of society, 2016 has been something of an annus horribilis. But never fear. As is customary, we’ve cast our collective eyes back over the year to pick out some cinematic highlights. Despite being based in the UK, we pride ourselves on our festival coverage and as such we’ve allowed any film that…
