Joseph Walsh

★★☆☆☆ Hollywood heartthrob George Clooney clambers back into the director’s chair for the fifth time with Second World War comedy caper, The Monuments Men (2014). Heading up yet another ensemble cast, including Cate Blanchett, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, John Goodman and Bill Murray, Clooney plays Frank Stokes, an art historian at the Fogg Museum (based…

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★★☆☆☆ There’s more than a hint of hagiography in Joshua Michael Stern’s tick-box biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, out now in the UK on both DVD and VOD. On paper at least, the late Jobs represents ripe material. He was a megalomaniac figure who would revolutionise the technology industry. He was a man whose…

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★★★☆☆ We head to bat country this week for Charlie Paul’s new documentary For No Good Reason (2012), detailing the life and work of Ralph Steadman – the illustrator and cartoonist best known for his work with Hunter S. Thompson on the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Before the Gonzo years, Steadman worked…

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★★★☆☆ A snarling, scabrous adaptation of American playwright Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning familial drama, John Wells’ August: Osage County (2013) makes its way onto DVD and Blu-ray this week boasting embittered turns from both Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep, amongst many others. We open to the cardigan-clad, world-weary poet Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) currently under…

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★★★☆☆ Actor turned writer-director John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (2013) offers up an outlandish concept, and despite some notable pitfalls, manages to navigate the territory with a wry charm and warmth. All of which is bolstered by the director’s use of common sense in casting Woody Allen to bring a dry wit to the proceedings. In…

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★★★☆☆ Stacie Passon’s debut film Concussion (2013) explores the modern ennui suffered by liberal cookie-cutter wives – with a twist that the female in question is a lesbian with her own partner and children. Beginning with a slightly satirical opening featuring a gaggle of middle-aged Stepford Wives doing a spinning class (as David Bowie’s Oh!…

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★★★☆☆ John Banville is one of Ireland’s greatest literary sons of recent decades. In 2005, he won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, a tale of a man in later life consumed by both a dark secret from his youth and the recent death of his wife. Banville now adapts his own work for…

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★★★☆☆ French-Canadian filmmaking prodigy Xavier Dolan (Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother) takes Oscar Wilde’s “The love that dare not speak its name” adage to new extremes in repression thriller Tom at the Farm (2013). Dolan inserts himself into the title role of Tom, an ad agency editor who finds himself in the backwaters of Canada…

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★★★☆☆ The lights have been lit once more for James Bobin’s Muppets Most Wanted (2014), a somewhat lacklustre follow-up to his 2011 comeback hit The Muppets, with Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais replacing Amy Adams and Jason Seigel as the film’s human points of interest. In The Muppets, the fuzzy little furballs of fun were…

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★★★☆☆ Actor turned director Jalil Lespert’s latest feature, Yves Saint Laurent (2014), sets about the ambitious task of condensing into an 106-minute film the life and work of one of fashion’s most celebrated icons. The result is a stylish melodrama, enriched by touching performances from Comédie-Française actors Pierre Niney and Gaullaume Gallienne. Opening in Oran,…

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