Christopher Machell

★★★★★ After wowing Japanese audiences with a small theatrical run and a screening at the Udine Film Festival in 2017, Shin’ichirô Ueda’s micro-budget zombie flick has finally arrived in the UK, giving us the best horror comedy since Shaun of the Dead, as well as a joyous, unhinged tribute to independent filmmaking. Opening seemingly in the…

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★★★★★ Animals, both literally and figuratively, play a crucial part in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films: three of his last six features feature beasts in their titles. The title of his latest, The Favourite, may break with that trend, but bestial cunning and instinct run riot through this deliciously Machiavellian period drama.  In early eighteenth-century…

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★★★★☆ No costumed crime fighter has been rebooted and re-imagined more times than Spider-Man, so we might be forgiven for sighing at the prospect of yet another iteration of old web head. Yet this animated feature spins an entirely fresh and innovative yarn with new hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) donning Spidey’s duds. The result is…

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★★★★☆ Director David Lowery’s latest is based on the real-life shenanigans of Forrest Tucker, played here by Hollywood great Robert Redford, and his aging ‘Over the Hill Gang’. Tucker’s gang robbed a series of banks in the 1980s, but rather than making a straight crime flick, The Old Man & the Gun merges genre cinema with…

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★★★☆☆ After winning the World Heavyweight Championship under the fatherly tutelage of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), Adonis ‘Donny’ Creed (Michael B. Jordan) faces a new threat in the shape of Viktor (Romanian boxer Florian Munteanu), son of Ivan Drago – who thirty years ago killed Adonis’ father in the ring. Ryan Coogler’s Rocky revamp Creed surprised everyone in…

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★★★☆☆ Hot from the success of A Fantastic Woman, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio returns with the sexually charged, emotionally restrained Disobedience. Rachels Weisz and McAdams star in this tale of forbidden love and community proscription, yet Lelio’s film exhibits a level of visual artistry far above typically bland awards bait. Ronit Krushka (Weisz) is working as a photographer…

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★★★★★ Based on Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play of the same name, David Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun is at once a searing, affirming and defiant portrayal of race, poverty and frustrated aspiration in America. Headlined with a barnstorming performance from Sidney Poitier, his beleaguered family man is a far cry from the quiet dignity of his other key…

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★★★★★ Set in modern-day Salem, the events of Assassination Nation bear more than a passing resemblance to the town’s infamous hysterical witch-hunting history, even if heroine Lily’s (Odessa Young) claim that this is a true story has a whiff of “fake news” about it. In doing what all good satirists do, writer-director Sam Levinson constructs a twisted…

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★★★★☆ Hitler’s Hollywood begins not with the goose stepping and sieg heiling of Triumph of the Will, but instead with some jaunty whistling from the 1937 film Der Mann der Sherlock Holmes war. In these opening moments, Rüdiger Suchsland’s doc signals Nazi-era German cinema as an idealistic, seductive and deeply complex arm of the regime’s propaganda machine. Drily narrated by…

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