Film Reviews

A long cherished project for director Wash Westmoreland and his late husband and writing partner Richard Glatzer, Colette has been over fifteen years in the planning. It’s a bit disappointing, then, to find that it’s a fairly straightforward telling of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s (Keira Knightley) life during her marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars, known both professionally and socially as Willy (Dominic West). During this time she wrote a series of Claudine novels, based on her own life but which, like the work...

ShirkersDir: Sandi TanMany films are lost, but I’m not sure I’ve ever previously heard of a film being stolen. Shirkers is a film about a film, one made in 1989 by a group of film students, written by 18 year old Sandi Tan and directed by Georges Cardona, who taught her and her friends to be filmmakers, Shirkers was one of a tiny handful of independent films made in Singapore, which at the time had no film industry to speak...

I had the toys when I was growing up, but oddly I don’t have any specific memory of the Transformers TV show, the same goes for the animated film that so many fans hold close to their hearts. That being the case, when I saw Michael Bay’s first live action entry in the film series that Bumblebee forms a prequel to, I wasn’t angry, just bored. I got angry come the second and third films, not only because they were...

For some years now, I have been a frustrated fan of the British actress Andrea Riseborough. She’s clearly a huge talent, but one who always seemed to turn up and be the best thing in movies that were anything from disaster (Madonna’s misbegotten W/E, in which she shone against all odds) to disappointment (Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, which underused her, meaning that the film’s revenge narrative never connected with me). Finally, Riseborough has a film that can match her. Nancy is...

Adapted from The New Yorker article of the same name, The Old Man & the Gun tells the mostly true story of a serial bank robber who even in his 70s couldn’t resist the thrill of his next heist. Following a miraculous escape from San Quentin prison, Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) begins a string of robberies that confuse the authorities and begin to catch the attention of the public. Young detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) is left perplexed and quickly becomes obsessed with the...

So there is a bad Coen Brothers film. Dispiritingly, this was my first thought once the credits rolled for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Even worse, I started to think it about 30 minutes in. As someone who has spent the last decade insisting The Big Lewbowski and No Country for Old Men are more than just overly-violent nonsense, I had to concede that the latest offering from Joel and Ethan is, sadly, just that.  The film's plot (and it's generous to claim it has one) rests...

Disclaimer: I had watched seven John Carpenter films in a row immediately prior to sitting down to this. I do not think this affected my judgement, but I don't know for sure. Wreck-It-Ralph is a hugely fun movie. A heartfelt nod to the arcade games of yonder, a protagonist echoing without plagiarising Toy Story, and some sentimental and hilarious moments to show that Disney Animation Studios could still compete with Pixar. Which is all what made Ralph Breaks The Internet so disappointing to me....

If you splice Mean Girls, Spring Breakers and Tarantino levels of blood together you end up with Assassination Nation. Focusing on how the suburban enclave of Salem “loses its motherfucking mind”, after a mysterious hacker divulges the town’s deepest, darkest secrets online. Sam Levinson’s film starts off with its pedal to floor and doesn’t relent for a dizzying 110 minutes. The fatal trigger for the town is when the conservative (used here instead of Republican) town mayor is outed as a cross-dresser. The scandal! As one townsperson says, “he ran on a ticket of family values!”. He commits...

Just a couple of reviews this week, both from my catch up on 2018 titles. Megan Leavey In this fact based drama, Kate Mara plays Megan Leavey, who, at 20, joins the Marines out of a sense that her life isn’t going anywhere. She ends up training as a dog handler, paired with a bomb clearing dog named Rex. Megan and Rex are injured while clearing a field of mines. In danger and with another dog unit hours away, they...