Category: Nick Hilton
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#LFF 2019: Greed review
★★☆☆☆ Michael Winterbottom reunites with his perennial stars Steve Coogan and Shirley Henderson for a satire of the superrich set in the days running up to a lavish 60th birthday party in Mykonos. Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a clear pastiche of Philip Green that skims just wide enough of biography to keep the film…
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Film Review: Mid90s
★★☆☆☆ Written and directed by Jonah Hill, Mid90s paints a deeply personal, sun-drenched vision of skate culture in Los Angeles, as seen through the eyes of its teenage protagonist. It’s the latest production from A24, the company who brought us Moonlight, Lady Bird and Eighth Grade, who have established themselves as the foremost voice in films about the pains and pressures…
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Film Review: Mary Queen of Scots
★★☆☆☆ Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots is the latest attempt to tell the well-worn story of Mary Stuart, who challenged the protestant hold on the English throne under Elizabeth I. Starring Saoirse Ronan in the titular role and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth it is, in short, two hours of overwrought, stagey nonsense that somehow…
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Film Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
★★★☆☆ Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the latest instalment in a projected pentalogy from J.K. Rowling, which finds Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander doing battle with Johnny Depp’s eponymous Grindelwald, whilst a selection of the, also eponymous, fantastic beasts dart fleetingly through the streets of Paris. In truth, the plot is much far more…
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Film Review: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
★★★☆☆ As cultural curiosities go, they don’t get much more curious than Fred Rogers. A Pennsylvania pastor with a penchant for puppetry, he became the soft-spoken voice of public broadcasting for children over the course of fifty years. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Morgan Neville, charts the rise (with no…
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#LFF 2018: Can You Ever Forgive Me? review
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over 400 faked letters. Melissa McCarthy has quietly been on a real bum streak of late…
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Film Review: Ocean’s 8
★★★☆☆ Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy was, briefly, the hottest property in Hollywood. The star-studded cast of his 2001 Rat Pack remake delivered a film that was flawlessly confident, engaging and, above all, fun. It was as pure a two hours of joy as cinema could deliver, but Soderbergh went somewhat off-piste with the two sequels, including a…
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Film Review: Book Club
★★★★☆ Four older women, bonded by the passage of time and extremely expensive interior design, meet for a monthly book club. Their world is turned upside down when Fifty Shades of Grey is chosen for the group. This sounds like an elevator pitch from hell and yet somehow it snuck past financiers and ended up…
