Film Reviews

The opening to First Man is an intense, dizzying few minutes which you hope is a dream sequence as it cannot be real life. The sound is deafening, the rickety nature of the X15 aircraft Armstrong is flying, brought home with full force as he ascends further into the atmosphere than intended. Although we know how First Man ends this is a glimpse at how the turbulent journey started. The fervour surrounding space travel, the moon landings and astronauts is one of an idealistic heroism but here, Chazelle’s opening brings home the idea that the group of highly intelligent engineers who ascended into space were far more...

Expanding his short film, writer, director and actor Jim Cummings plays Jim, a cop who has a meltdown while trying to give a eulogy at his mother’s funeral. From there, he struggles to hold things together in his job and in his personal life, as he tries to bond with his daughter and fight his ex-wife’s request for sole custody. Right from the start, Thunder Road throws you with its tone. We first find a clearly distraught Jim stumbling through...

PiggyI’ve always been a fan of films and TV series’ that depict the experience of being a teenager through the lens of horror. Being a teenager often sucks, and horror has always existed, at least in part, to help us parse and process parts of our lives we don’t like or don’t want to confront. Piggy starts in this place, with an overweight teenage girl going for a swim, only to be spotted and targeted for some pretty vicious bullying...

CatcallsAfter flashing a couple of teenage girls, a man gets more than he bargained for in this well made horror from Kate Dolan. Like a lot of shorts, Catcalls feels a bit more like a scene from a feature that might be in its director’s future than a truly self-contained eight minute story, but that’s no bad thing in this case. Catcalls fits right in with not just the rising tide of female, and indeed feminist, driven horror but with...

When his beloved wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is murdered in front of him by a gang of ‘Jesus freak’ bikers on industrial strength LSD, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) goes on a rage, booze and drug fuelled rampage of bloody revenge. Just look at that summary. How cool does that sound? I should love this. I should be shouting from the rooftops that it’s a hallucinatory new exploitation classic that can stand with the best of the recent tributes to the...

In real life Columbus, Indiana is a rather unassuming small city located in the American heart land. With a population of around 50,000 people it would be easy to overlook Columbus in favour of the larger and more recognisable cities that can be found not too far away. Academic turned filmmaker Kogonada’s debut film can at first seem a little modest but it doesn’t take long to appreciate the depth and wisdom that Columbus contains. The film centres on a friendship between Jin (John Cho), an American living in...

In Venom, Sony’s latest Marvel offering, director Ruben Fleischer and his writing team seem to have completely failed to grasp the fact that the world has moved on from the old superhero tropes of two-dimensional characters and half-baked ideas that relied too often on a lazy premise and even lazier dialogue. This shift in attitude could be attributed to a number of things, but if we’re going to be completely honest, most of it falls back on the way Disney have handled...

The Guilty A few years ago, I said that the acclaimed Locke was essentially radio. Set entirely in a car, with its protagonist having telephone conversations as he drives on into the night, it struck me as something that, whatever its other qualities, imparted nothing extra to us by being presented in a visual format. The Guilty is set entirely in an emergency call centre as Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), bored by being tied to a desk job, is finally...

1937. 1954. 1976. 2018. A Star Is Born has had a version for almost every generation of cinema, and the pull of its story can travel across eras with ease. In Bradley Cooper's latest version, he takes the '76 approach of transferring the story to purely music: self-destructive star Jackson Maine (Cooper) stumbles into a back street bar one day in search of more booze. There he comes across a performer in Ally (Lady Gaga) that fascinates him, and one he wants...