Film Reviews

A few days ago, there was a report telling us that we have about 12 years to fundamentally change how we treat our planet, or climate change will be both irreversible and catastrophic. Alone in Space never tells us outright why the Earth was dying, meaning the giant spaceship on which we find 12 year old Gladys (Ella Rae Rappaport) and her six year old brother Keaton (Dante Fleischanderl) was built, but you could certainly fit a message about climate...

Drew Goddard’s Bad Times At The El Royale is a gripping Tarantinoesque Nixon era crime caper in which seven strangers find themselves battling it out through a stormy night at a dilapidated, and tastelessly decorated hotel which straddles the California and Nevada border. Written by Goddard himself, the film presents an ambitious and rather inspired premise, but is ultimately let down by an aimless plot and a decidedly overlong running time. Arriving at the El Royale car park on her...

“You’ll never understand, just listen to me” says Kaja (Andrea Berntzen), looking into the camera, at the beginning of this real time telling of the story of the Utøya massacre perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. Kaja isn’t talking to us but to her mother, but clearly the target of this dialogue is the audience. We arrive on the island as the teens at its political summer camp have just heard about the explosion at the Government buildings in Oslo that...

Tumbbad India’s cinema industry is the biggest in the world, and it often bothers me that I know so little about it, whether that means the Bollywood mainstream or something like Tumbbad, which feels much more independent in spirit. Told across three chapters and thirty years, Tumbbad sets up its backstory early, with the tale of the forgotten god Hastar, who stole all the gold from his mother, who created the world and the other gods. Legend has it that...

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...