★★★★☆ Music video director Melina Matsoukas brings her considerable talents to the big screen with Queen & Slim, a crime drama fitted out like Bonnie and Clyde but driven by the engine of contemporary racial politics. The gorgeous framing that characterises her earlier work serves this debut beautifully, while understated turns Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Industry commentators were somewhat taken aback by Kathy Bates’ Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Clint Eastwood’s latest “fact-based” drama, Richard Jewell. Not only was this seen as the sacrilegious nod that knocked Hustlers’ Jennifer Lopez out of the Oscar race, but it was also for a Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Back in 2015, Robert Eggers delighted critics with the flesh-pecking horror of The Witch, a directorial feature debut which blended the theatrics of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with shades of M. Night Shyamalan and the more grizzly adaptations of Stephen King. Five years on and Eggers is back to Continue Reading
Martin Scorsese’s Netflix epic The Irishman received a total of ten Academy Award nominations including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. We’ll have to wait and see how many statuettes Scorsese’s latest masterpiece will win on 9 February. However, Continue Reading
The cinematic experience has created a cultural phenomenon of film addicts wanting to live lives that are more like their movie starring counterparts – the people that they associate with, the characters that they are passionate about. This culture of identifying with characters from films, and also television shows, has Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Acclaimed satirist Armando Iannucci follows up the pitch-black delights of 2017’s The Death of Stalin with The Personal History of David Copperfield, a relatively conventional Charles Dickens adaptation embellished with occasional flashes of the Scotsman’s abrasive humour. This is – by this writer’s count at least – the eighth Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Shengze Zhu’s Present. Perfect. looks at the culture of live-streaming in China. Composed entirely of found footage and presented in black and white to lend visual consistency, the film raises important questions about the politics of viewership, the documentary form’s complex ties to reality and about human relationships in Continue Reading
★★★★★ Authentic being, leaps of faith and mortality haunt every frame of Terrence Malick’s latest opus, A Hidden Life (aka Radegund). Basing his new film on the life and death of WW2 conscientious objector, Franz Jägerstätter, the reclusive American auteur is unlikely to win over detractors, but true believers will Continue Reading
The nominations for this year’s 92nd Academy Awards were announced this morning. As was the case with the Baftas a week prior, Todd Phillips’ Joker led the way with a huge eleven nominations, followed by Sam Mendes’ 1917, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood all on ten. Continue Reading
Since the inception of action cinema, there have been actors who focused on getting ripped before they could play various roles in action movies. Undeniably, they have become legends and famous in many social circles. Many of these actors have been a significant motivation for fitness enthusiasts who want to Continue Reading
Post-credits scenes have become so incredibly popular today – particularly in big action series – that many moviegoers will stay seated in the theatre until the end of the credits just to see if there’s a bonus scene. But this trend goes back a lot further than the recent Marvel Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Actors playing other actors always feels like a dangerous act of appropriation. Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, James Franco in James Dean and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, all feel like a claim is being made: “I can play them inside and Continue Reading
The explosion of broadband and more recently, 5G, have literally changed our lives. In fact, whether it may be shopping online at Amazon to playing blackjack at RoyalVegas casino, we can spend all out time online. Furthermore, with faster internet speeds and high-performance portable devices, we now have the ability Continue Reading
The nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards were announced this morning. Todd Phillips’ Joker led the way with a huge eleven nominations, followed by Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood on ten. Sam Mendes’ First World War epic 1917 – released Continue Reading
Despite receiving a total of 34 nominations across film and television, Netflix limped away from this year’s Golden Globes ceremony with just two awards – Best Supporting Actress for Marriage Story’s Laura Dern and Olivia Colman for her star performance in The Crown. Sam Mendes’ First World War epic 1917 picked up Continue Reading
