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Baftas 2020: Joker leads the pack with 11 nominations
The nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards were announced this morning. Todd Phillips’ Joker led the way with a huge eleven nominations, followed by Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood on ten. Sam Mendes’ First World War epic 1917 – released in UK cinemas this week…
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Golden Globes 2020: 1917, Parasite and Awkwafina victorious
Despite receiving a total of 34 nominations across film and television, Netflix limped away from this year’s Golden Globes ceremony with just two awards – Best Supporting Actress for Marriage Story’s Laura Dern and Olivia Colman for her star performance in The Crown. Sam Mendes’ First World War epic 1917 picked up two major accolades – Best…
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Film Review: Amanda
★★★★☆ Mikhaël Hers’ sensitive, heartfelt third feature Amanda is about loss and bereavement in the aftermath of a brutal terrorist attack in a Paris park. David (Vincent Lacoste), twenty-four, loses his sister Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb) and has to decide whether he can take on the care of her seven-year-old daughter, Amanda (Isaure Multrier). The film opens…
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Film Review: Jojo Rabbit
★★★★☆ “Fuck off, Hitler!” The spirit of Taika Waititi’s satirical comedy is certainly clear in its demands for the monster supreme of national socialism to kindly do one. While the spectre of global fascism seems to once again be rearing its head, Waititi finds a way to turn his unique brand of humour to the…
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Artificial Intelligence at the movies
Twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction has had a fascination with AI, and that fascination, of course, extends to movies. There are all sorts of AI programs in movies. With this ranking of AI in cinema, you can learn a little more about movie AI with typical adult intelligence. Maria – Metropolis Metropolis was released in 1927,…
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Film Review: Long Day’s Journey into Night
★★★★☆ “The difference between film and memory is that films are always false”, muses protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) early on in Long Day’s Journey into Night. If what we see, like Hongwu’s own perspective, is unreliable, and if we can’t even trust the narrator of the story, then how can we believe his memories…
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Our 20 most anticipated films of 2020
Tail-ended by superb new offerings from the likes of Martin Scorsese (The Irishman), Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) and Greta Gerwig (Little Women), 2019 has been a vintage year for not only American filmmaking but world cinema. Our top picks of 2019 reflect some of the quality and variety of this year’s film offerings. Now it’s…
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Film Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
★☆☆☆☆ Rey (Daisy Ridley) is continuing her force training, now under the tutelage of Leia (a disturbingly reanimated Carrie Fisher). Meanwhile, we are told that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is consumed with a quest to find the ultimate evil in the galaxy. Forty years and nine episodes in the making, can J.J. Abrams’ capper to…
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The best of 2019: Our films of the year
With Netflix’s The Irishman and Marriage Story dominating early awards season debate – and both featuring in our collective top ten – the streaming platforms have truly arrived as major contenders to the traditional studios. And it wasn’t just in the field of English-language filmmaking that Netflix made major gains. World cinema has also benefitted,…
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Film Review: Citizen K
★★★★☆ Alex Gibney returns with this gripping study of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch-turned-activist who was sentenced to nine years in prison after challenging Vladimir Putin. Power corrupts, the saying goes, but in Gibney’s new documentary, ultimate power – or at least the kind wielded by the once-richest man in Russia – appears to have…
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