Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ The multi-hyphenate Viggo Mortensen can now add director to his list of creative endeavors with Falling, an austere familial drama which he also wrote, scored, co-produced and stars in. Mortensen plays John Peterson, a pilot whose stable life in […]
★★★★☆ At an age when, for most, a trip to the bathroom would count as the most strenuous task of the day, ex-pat champion of authentic Mexican cuisine Diana Kennedy is still excitedly on the hunt for that most elusive […]
★★★★☆ A delve into the relatively short life of charismatic INXS frontman Michael Hutchence somehow feels long overdue. Perhaps because he was foremost a fascinating figure in rock, whose mystique and allure was sadly upended with the constant press intrusions […]
★★★★☆ For a film to announce itself with such a knowingly outlandish title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot was deliberately baiting that midnight movie-type audience. You only need to see […]
★★★★☆ Documentary as self-therapy, the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap arrives in the UK this week following a flurry of State-side plaudits – all of which are entirely justifiable. Chronicling the lives of himself and two friends from teenage years to […]
★★☆☆☆ When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg created the zom-rom-com in 2004 with their beloved Shaun of the Dead, even they couldn’t have envisioned just how many genre mash-ups could have been spun from the walking dead. Since then we’ve […]
★★★★☆ While Anchor and Hope’s subject matter will undoubtedly pique the interests of a LGBTQ audience, it’s clear that director Carlos Marques-Marcet isn’t interested in pigeonholing his work, and that the film’s themes of family and unity will strike a […]
★★★★★ Hong Kong megastar Jackie Chan is as prolific as they come – last year alone, the 64-year-old had eight acting credits to his name – but it was 1983’s Project A which not only solidified his reputation back home, […]
★★★☆☆ A British war-time thriller with a difference, Eye of the Needle is played out as far removed from those war-torn battlefields as you could get. Instead, director Richard Marquand opts largely for more intimate surrounding and manages to squeeze out […]
★★★★☆ The rise, fall and eventual rise again of James Lavelle, vinyl junkie turned trailblazing record label producer and creative figurehead of musical outfit UNKLE, may be an overly familiar tale of the young ingénue who succumbs to his own […]
★★★☆☆ Another week, another anniversary celebration of a firm favourite from the decade that continues to be more influential across the modern pop culture landscape than any other time period. In an era when Winona Ryder was the celebrated alternative […]
★★★☆☆ “Greed isn’t good” remains the predominant message in Laura Greenfield’s sporadically engrossing and frequently overreaching look at the culture of capitalism. Generation Wealth feels like something of a thesis project for the director, who was behind 2012’s similarly-themed, multiple […]
★★★★☆ John Curry might not be a name immediately recognisable to younger sporting fans, but after a successful competitive career on the ice – topped off with a gold medal during the 1976 Winter Olympics – he blazed a trail […]
★★★★☆ The beautifully constructed opening credits to Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are set fifty years after the character’s supposed death, where his personal artefacts are being reopened and methodically inspected. It suggests that what we’re about […]
★★★☆☆ Following the success of Night of the Living Dead, the late George A. Romero became something of a one-man movie studio in his adopted city of Pittsburgh. Romero didn’t opt for the obvious and took a much more unconventional, […]