Marc J. Francis and Max Pugh’s documentary, Walk with Me, sets itself up as if it were to be an exploration of a truly interesting character. A title card introduces Thich Nhát Hanh, an exiled Zen Buddhist Monk from Vietnam, who, having relocated to France, has established the Plum Village...

You can almost hear the faint chorus of “America, fuck yeah!” in the background of Steven Quale’s Bosnia-set, Navy SEALs action-adventure romp. Penned (in part) by Luc Besson, Renegades is a mash-up of Team America and Three Kings without any of the cynicism or irony, and played with the same...

With Dunkirk sitting comfortably in many of this year’s top 10 best of 2017 lists, it seems fitting to revisit another great World War 2 film. Stuart Cooper’s Overlord, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, is a quiet, elegiac tale that took the Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale upon...

In 2013, Netflix commissioned its first original series, House of Cards. Two years later the streaming platform released its first original movie, Beasts of No Nation, and has, since then, continued to release a steady stream of films that are slowly beginning to rival and compete with Hollywood and traditional...

Christmas is the season of giving, when people come together and rejoice in each other’s company. So, what better way to spend your pre-Christmas Friday than in the company of three loathsome characters, whose sense of cheer comes at the expense of others and to watch them slowly descend into...

With family overseas, Christmas time has often meant a fair deal of travel, travel that has always involved international flights. When my family was based in the Middle East, I was often fortunate enough to find myself cozying into a long haul flight on an airline that boasted a great...

Dubbed a “ramen western,” Tampopo shares the narrative skeleton of, you guessed, a western. Substitute gun slinging for noodle kneading and you’ve taken a step towards the flavour of Jûzô Itami’s film. But, like a steaming bowl of noodle soup, Tampopo is a film for the soul packed with the...

Coming from director-provocateur Sion Sono, who wrote the script 17 years prior to the film’s production, watching Why Don’t You Play in Hell? is akin to slamming a handful of uppers, chasing them down with a flaming shot of Sambuca, and diving, whilst laughing manically, into a samurai sword swinging...

This week we throw ourselves into the sweaty fray of Laurent Cantet’s school set docudrama, The Class (original French language title, Entre Les Murs).  Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by François Bégaudeau, who also co-wrote the script and stars, Cantet brings to life, with startling realism...