Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours by A.J. Marriot, who also featured as a consultant on the film, Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is part biography and part homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, […]
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over […]
Zheng Kai is one of China’s biggest actors, but in the West he’s hardly known. Promoting his latest film, Shadow, a visually striking period action epic from Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero, The House of Flying Daggers and The Great Wall, Zheng is hoping that all that is about to change.
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew […]
★★★★☆ Lords of Chaos charts the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the increasingly bitter rivalry between two major players on the scene, which in 1993 led to the murder of musician Øystein Aarseth. Informing the audience the film we’re […]
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip […]
★★★★★ Deploying the Greek myth of Orpheus in a contemporary setting, mimicked nine years later by Marcel Camus in Black Orpheus, Jean Cocteau’s bewitching touch shines bright in Orphée. Restoring this eternal tale of love to the big screen, this new […]
★★★★★ Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old uses the latest in digital effects, 3D, frame-rate tinkering and colouration to take audiences back to the Great War 1914-1918, showing us what life was really like in the trenches. The resulting […]
★★★★☆ Following up his 2016 western Hell or High Water, director David Mackenzie takes us back to medieval Scotland with Outlaw King, a bloody, visceral and rousing interpretation of Robert the Bruce’s rebellion against English tyranny. In his second collaboration with Mackenzie, […]
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in […]
★★★☆☆ Based on the devastating Salvadoran civil war of 1980-1992, and told from the perspective of American photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods), Oliver Stone’s third film lacks the polish of his later work, but is no less excoriating in its […]
★★★★☆ Fred Dekker’s 1986 Night of the Creeps begins as it means to go on, opening with a frantic chase through the corridors of a spaceship populated with ludicrously rotund aliens, crashing into the monochrome of 1950s small town USA, before […]