Joseph Walsh

★★★★☆ Since its announcement, press interest surrounding the latest film about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been dominated by its writer Aaron Sorkin, who has dutifully offers a rich and textured screenplay. Contrastingly, its director Danny Boyle provides only the lightest of touches, with this refreshing biopic largely absent of his typical stylistic devices. There’s…

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★★☆☆☆ “The dead are alive,” we’re informed at the start of Sam Mendes’ second Bond outing Spectre (2015), and there’s a definite sense that this 24th entry into the franchise is attempting to resurrect ghosts from the past. Sadly, it is far from successful. The action begins gliding through the bustling streets of Mexico City…

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★★★☆☆ There were few films at Cannes this year with as strange a central premise Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English language offering The Lobster (2015), written with his long-standing collaborator Efthymis Filippou. Bearing the macabre tone of his previous works Dogtooth (2008) and Alps (2011), Lanthimos plants the audience in a bizarre world where being single…

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★★★★☆ The ongoing battle for equality of the sexes is an issue that is constantly debated in the media – and rightly so. The sense that there’s still a great deal of work to be done in society is the message at the heart of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015), which follows a group of women…

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★★★☆☆ It would be a mistake to call Anton Corbijn’s Life (2015) a James Dean biopic, despite its subject matter. Far more interesting is the fact that Corbijn, a world famous photographer known for working with everyone from Bob Dylan to U2, has chosen to direct a film about photographer Dennis Stock, the man responsible…

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★★★☆☆ Plunging you into the mindset of a group of mountaineers tackling the highest point on Earth, Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest (2015) is a heady disaster movie based on the true-life story of a disastrous 1996 expedition that ended in the deaths of twelve professional and non-professional climbers. Pitching man against nature, we meet Rob Hall…

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★★★☆☆ There has always been a wide appeal to the myth of the Kray brothers, who ruled London’s underworld in the Swinging Sixties. Now they are the subjects of Brian Helgeland’s glossy biopic Legend (2015). Tom Hardy takes on the double role of the infamous twins, in what ultimately is a well polished, but plodding…

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★★★☆☆ Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) helmer Guy Ritchie returns to the director’s chair with The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a stylish rework of the famed 1960s TV show starring chap of steel Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer and Alicia Vikander. The effect is a slick action-adventure, lacking pace and plotting, wrapped in beautiful production…

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★★☆☆☆ Tom Cruise reprises his role as spy Ethan Hunt in Rogue Nation (2015), the fifth instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, this time helmed by screenwriter-turned-director Christopher McQuarrie. While it may deliver on the expected hi-octane thrills and spills with a slew of outrageous stunts, it also delivers a ham-fisted third act and the…

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★★★★☆ Starring Paul Rudd as the diminutive hero, Ant-Man (2015) is a hilarious heist movie cum superhero flick that proves to be a hugely enjoyable and playful way to bring the studios ‘Phase Two’ to a close. It revels in oddity; then again, it is about a shrinking hero who can control armies of ants. Because…

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