Christopher Machell

★★★★☆ 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 director is truly in his…

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★★★★★ 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 novels. The final day of…

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★★★★☆ 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 and heartfelt. Poitier’s most famous…

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★★☆☆☆ In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, life may well have found a way, but the same can’t be said for decent screenwriting or even basic logic in this execrable sequel. It’s a pretty mean feat to beat even Jurassic Park III as the worst JP film to date, but even a handful of nice flourishes…

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★★★★★ Tired of washing dishes for a living in his small Texan town, Joe (Jon Voight) ups stick to New York City to make his fortune as a high-class stud. On arriving, he soon meets a sickly hustler by the name of Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) and gets a very nasty dose of reality into the…

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★★★★☆ On a dark and stormy night, self-conscious genre tropes abound in James Whale’s riotously fun 1932 gothic chiller The Old Dark House. Five people find themselves stuck overnight in a creepy old mansion, tenanted by a bizarre brother and sister, their decrepit father and a monstrous butler played by the inimitable Boris Karloff. Bickering…

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★★★★★ Based on the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925 and adapted from Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play of the same name, Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film is a searing indictment of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism. Inherit the Wind’s relevance continues beyond its immediate parallels with McCarthyism. Opening with an impressive crane shot of a…

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★★☆☆☆ While a Yankee army train stops to restock its water supply, John Deakin (Charles Bronson) is caught cheating at cards at a nearby saloon. No sooner than he’s arrested and packed on to the train along with a state governor, his daughter and a Marshal, passengers start meeting their untimely ends at the hands…

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★★★★☆ 2016’s Deadpool bucked the trend of sanitised superhero schlock with winking humour, copious gore, and f-bombs galore. So how does one follow-up one of the most refreshing blockbusters in recent memory? The answer, evidently, is more profanity, more Troma-esque ultra-violence, more snarky adolescent meta-commentary. In short: more Deadpool. Filling in for departing director Tim…

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★★★★☆ In Manhattan, a circle of wealthy young socialites party, gossip and generally congratulate themselves while the self-styled intellectual Tom (Edward Clements) reluctantly joins the group. Riffing on Noel Coward and Woody Allen, and prefiguring the preppy urban cinema of Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman’s directorial debut is a terrifically satirical portrayal of the upper echelons…

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