“If you give an audience all the answers they’ll forget you as soon as they leave the cinema. But, if you ask the right questions, they’ll think about you for days.” This was the advice of two-time Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi as he delivered a masterclass to a group Continue Reading
★★★★★ Back in UK cinemas to mark a BFI retrospective of the French New Wave director, Agnès Varda’s acclaimed 1985 road movie Vagabond, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, is a veritable masterwork from one of our greatest living filmmakers. A scruffy-looking girl sits in a field. It’s winter. She attempts to eat part of Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was a masterclass in direction, cinematography, sound design and dramatic tension. This year’s sequel Sicario 2: Soldado, directed by Italian crime-thriller veteran Stefano Sollima, is a solid but less memorable effort. Despite its big-name cast and eventful narrative, the original film had a distinctly art-house touch Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ The phrase “man’s best friend” is put firmly to the test in Patrick, a new British comedy from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie director Maddie Fletcher. Sarah (Beattie Edmondson) is the odd one out of her family. Her life is messy, love life a constant disappointment and feelings of living Continue Reading
★★★★★ Eight years on from Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik offers up Leave No Trace starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, an intricately crafted and haunting drama, based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock. “Your socks burned you,” scolds Will (Foster) when he discovers his daughter, Tom, hiding Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Jim Haynes is the focus of Meeting Jim, an unexpectedly captivating documentary by Ece Ger that’s been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Film award at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. Quite rightly too, as Jim spent a large portion of his life in the Scottish capital, attending Continue Reading
★★★★☆ After his best friend Esteban is devoured my a mysterious monster of the deep, the legendary undersea documentarian Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) vows to find and destroy the creature to avenge his friend. Designating the animal the ‘jaguar shark’, Zissou and his team set out in search of his Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Very loosely based on the childhood of Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hung, Woo-Ping Yuen’s Iron Monkey is a terrifically entertaining action picture in the Hong Kong Kung Fu tradition. Woo-Ping would later go on to choreograph the fight sequences in The Matrix films, but it is here where the Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The Marvel Cinematic Universe may have the market hold, but Incredibles 2 – which arrives some fourteen years after the original – is a superior superhero film to much of their output. It’s also a wonderfully ever-inventive film that, despite being a sequel, feels fresh and original. The film Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Matt Palmer’s debut feature Calibre is a tense, brutal thriller set in the rural Scottish Highlands. It boasts meaty performances from local talent Jack Lowden and Martin McCann as Vaughn and Marcus respectively, two childhood friends reunited for a weekend hunting trip. Vaughn is hesitant, now settled with a Continue Reading
When we think of the world’s most heroic movie protagonists, ranging from superheroes such as Superman and Iron Man, to the likes of The Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Mad Max: Fury Road’s Furiosa, we think of them as brave, unflinching badasses who have an innate power to save the day Continue Reading
★★★★★ On 25 November 1970, Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s leading authors, attempted a coup d’etat with three members of his private army before committing seppuku. Paul Schrader’s stunning biopic follows Mishima over the course of that day, punctuated by flashbacks of his real life and dramatised segments of his Continue Reading
★★★★☆ When a prisoner transport crashes during a night-time storm, John ‘Joker’ Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) make their escape, chained together by the wrist. The director’s third feature, The Defiant Ones combines Stanley Kramer’s trademark liberal politics with a picaresque adventure that is deftly entertaining, tense Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy was, briefly, the hottest property in Hollywood. The star-studded cast of his 2001 Rat Pack remake delivered a film that was flawlessly confident, engaging and, above all, fun. It was as pure a two hours of joy as cinema could deliver, but Soderbergh went somewhat off-piste with Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Located on the toe end of Italy’s boot, Gioa Tauro is a testament to Italy’s failure to develop the south. Far from the tourist traps of Rome and Venice and even the fizzier, more dangerous charms of Naples, the town has become synonymous with poverty, crime and the failure Continue Reading