Film Reviews

★☆☆☆☆ It’s probably best to establish, right up front, my engagement with Mike Mignola’s character, Hellboy. I never read the comics, so my only knowledge of the character comes from the two films made by Guillermo Del Toro in 2004 and 2008. I understand that Mignola was happy with them, but I have no idea whether those films or this one cleave closer to his work. Nor do I especially care. A film adaptation is a work distinct from a...

★★☆☆☆ In Little, director Tina Gordon presents a deeply contrived, narratively flawed and criminally mirthless high concept comedy about a female tech boss who is transformed into her younger self when the pressures of being an adult become too much to handle. Starring Regina Hall, Issa Rae and Marsai Martin (the child actor from the TV show Black-ish), Little first made the headlines when it was revealed that Martin, who came up with the idea for the film after watching...

Glaswegian Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) has just got out of prison after a 12 month sentence. Returning home, she’s greeted by her mother Marion (Julie Walters), who has been looking after her two young kids. She takes a job as a cleaner, but all Rose-Lynn really wants is to go to Nashville to be a country singer. When her employer Susannah (Sophie Okonedo) offers to help, it seems that opportunities might be opening up, but also that life might get...

Braid ★★★★★ Dir: Mitzi Peirone Petula and Tilda (Imogen Waterhouse and Sarah Hay), on the run from the law and saddled with a debt to their dealer, decide to rob an old friend, Daphne (Madeline Brewer). To do so they must fall back into the roles they played in childhood games, returning to a fantasy world in which Daphne still lives. It’s a slightly bizarre plot, but that summary only hints at the gleeful level of crazy that pervades Mitzi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpautDk-uMM Alenya Wood and Abu Ali of the Silver Screen Show discuss Tim Burton's live action remake of Disney classic Dumbo, in cinemas across the UK now.

★★★☆☆ In Dragged Across Concrete, Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn play cops Brett and Anthony, suspended for six weeks without pay for an act of police brutality. This perceived injustice stirs something in Mad Mel, and he becomes of the opinion that he and Vince should rob some gangsters as payback. This is the third film from S. Craig Zahler, after Bone Tomahawk with Kurt Russell and The Brawl in Cell Block 99, also starring Vaughn. Each follows a set template, in which...

★★★☆☆ The career of one of British music’s great eccentrics is affectionately told in Steve Sullivan’s documentary Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story. The film chronicles the life of Chris Sievey, a musician who took many guises between the early 1970s and his death in 2010. Sievey’s work was full on experimentation and saw him dabbling in homemade film and even early video games. His career took an unexpected turn when he began portraying his larger than life alter-ego Frank Sidebottom....

★★★★☆ Evil, posing not as a demon or vampire, but rising from within us, pitting family members against each other. While there is lots to be said for Jordan Peele’s Us, this same format followed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary is another excellent feature that dares to delve within the horror inside of us all. Based on the novel by Stephen King, doctor Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) moves with his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), children Ellie (Jete Laurence) and Gage...

★★★★★ Home invasion is among the scariest archetypes in horror, and Jordan Peele’s Us is the latest in a long tradition of twisted stories that tap into our deepest fears. What’s brilliant about Us is that it subverts what we know about the genre to create a delirious, doppelganger nightmare. This a brash and chilling movie with subtexts in abundance and much like Peele’s debut feature Get Out, it carries a political message. The focus is on the Wilson family....