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Radioactive superheros: superpowers or death?
Comic book fans around the world have been truly spoilt in the last few years, with so many Marvel and DC heroes hitting the big screen. We’ve been saturated in superhero origin stories, building up to until-now unheard-of cinematic universes on a massive scale. For many superheroes, their origin stories carry a similar trend. Yes,…
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Ranking the fashion sense of James Bond supervillains
When you hear a story about the most fashionable frontmen in films, everyone’s favourite Double-Oh agent might spring to mind. From Sean Connery sporting his own tailor’s handiwork to the Italian made-to-measure Brioni suits on Daniel Craig, James Bond is certainly one of the best-dressed characters on the big screen. But where would a well-dressed…
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Film Review: The Workshop
★★★☆☆ Alexei Sayle once cautioned that you should never enter a workshop that doesn’t have a vice in it. French writer-director Laurent Cantet’s new film The Workshop soon reveals that though it’s not that kind of workshop, he is still able to turn the screws. It’s summer in the small coastal French town of La…
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Film Review: The Price of Everything
★★★★★ Primarily centred around New York auction houses, art fairs and the colourful characters that frequent them, Nathaniel Kahn’s The Price of Everything certainly doesn’t hold back in its skewering of a contemporary art world defined far more by financial gain and status seeking than a genuine love of beauty. Khan leaves his subjects to…
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Film Review: Becoming Animal
★★★★☆ Becoming Animal is an unusual, thought-provoking film essay which upends many tropes of wildlife photography to create a rich landscape of ideas and images. The work of philosopher David Abram gets a good read-through as filmmakers Peter Mettler and Emma Davie explore the notion of a ‘more-than-human’ world. Photographing nature is, by definition, a…
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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: The Girl in the Spider’s Web
★★☆☆☆ The saga of Lisbeth Salander has spanned a collective eight films and novels, meaning any new entry has the uphill battle posed by familiarity. Director Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe) faced another hurdle with his take on The Girl: having to inherit and repurpose the franchise clothing weaved by David Fincher’s entry. The Girl in…
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Film Review: Suspiria (2018)
★★★★☆ Luca Guadagnino returns to screens this week with his long-awaited take on giallo classic Suspiria – minus much of the giallo. While there are several overt nods to Dario Argento’s vibrantly hued horror, the Call Me By Your Name director has been bold in his revisions, offering up a far more sober tale of power…
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DVD Review: Hitler’s Hollywood
★★★★☆ Hitler’s Hollywood begins not with the goose stepping and sieg heiling of Triumph of the Will, but instead with some jaunty whistling from the 1937 film Der Mann der Sherlock Holmes war. In these opening moments, Rüdiger Suchsland’s doc signals Nazi-era German cinema as an idealistic, seductive and deeply complex arm of the regime’s propaganda machine. Drily narrated by…
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Film Review: Wildlife
★★★★☆ Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife lands not with a thud but a slow caress, to be inhaled and ruminated on, its stagnant images billowing into your lungs, giving kudos to the fact that his switch from acting (There Will Be Blood, Prisoners) to directing has been made with a precision and ease. How many…
VENICE 2026