Film Reviews

Shot on an iPhone7 Plus, and costing just over $1 million to make, Steven Soderbergh’s latest feature film Unsane is a ballsy & brave foray into thriller territory from a director who has never been afraid of pushing the boundaries, and making do with what is available to him in the pursuit of innovative projects. Staring Claire Foy (The Crown) as a young woman who finds herself involuntarily committed to a mental institution, Unsane manages to offer a truly riveting,...

Fans of watching big robots and Kaiju-style monsters hitting each other repeatedly, destroying everything around them for good measure, rejoice! Everyone else, you might want to sit this one out, because if you were expecting anything resembling a coherent story from the follow up to Guillermo del Toro's 2013 blockbuster behemoth Pacific Rim, then you will be sorely disappointed. Directed by Steven S. DeKnight, and starring John Boyega - who incidentally is also credited as producer on the movie -...

Kore-eda Hirokazu intrigues with his investigative crime drama, The Third Murder, but the film falls prey to contrivances that sell it short. When Misumi (Yakusho Kôji), an employee at a food packaging plant, confesses to the murder of his boss, hot-shot lawyer Shigemori (Fukuyama Masaharu) is brought on to take his case. Charged with murder & burglary, and facing the death penalty, Shigemori wants to plea the case down to murder and theft and win his client the lesser sentence...

In Have a Nice Day, Liu Jian has created a world of multiple dimensions in the 2D renderings of a seedy southern China fringe town where lives intersect over a bag of cold hard cash. A suitable alternative title for this pulpy, crime-caper animation would be, “In the Mood for Money.” The story is simple, and the comparisons rife. When Xiao Zhang (Zhu Changlong), a low rent gangster existing on the bottom rung of the criminal ladder, robs underworld kingpin,...

While those of you on this side of the pond are unlikely to be familiar with A Wrinkle In Time: Madeleine L’Engle’s seminal YA novel, originally published in the early 60s, and the first instalment in her highly lauded ‘Time Quintet’ series. Over in America the book is something of a childhood mainstay, studied in classrooms for more than fifty years now, and beloved by many for its intellectual & emotional underpinnings. This warm-hearted and well-intentioned adaptation from Ava DuVernay...

It may have taken almost three years for My Golden Days to make its way from the Cannes Film Festival to British cinemas, but this affecting drama is more than worth the wait. It opens with a middle-aged anthropologist called Paul (Mathieu Amalric) preparing to leave Tajikistan where he has been working for almost a decade. As he gets off the plane in Paris, he is taken to one side and is questioned by a French intelligence agent (André Dussollier). Paul...

Films that fall under the banner of ‘Biblical Epic’ tend to follow the rule that for every Last Temptation of Christ there is a Passion of The Christ. Mary Magdalene is the latest film to fit comfortably under the banner of ‘Biblical Epic’, and it’s from the director Garth Davis of last year’s heartstring twanger, Lion. Rooney Mara plays the titular character, and for the first forty-five minutes she is in every single frame. Mara’s performance is composed and engaging....

Ruben Östlund’s mountain set ski drama, Force Majeure, landed with a bang at Cannes in 2014 and was quickly blanketed by an avalanche of critical success. Three years’ later, the Swedish born director returned and took home the festival’s top prize with The Square, a biting satire of the art world and a surreal, madcap deep dive into the complexities and flaws of humankind. Christian (Claes Bang), the model of Scandi-cool, is handsomely dishevelled in his fitted blazers, open neck...

Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) has forsaken her family fortune to become a London bicycle courier and amateur MMA fighter. After receiving an item from her missing (presumed dead) father, Lara goes in search of a cursed island in Japan carrying ancient treasure and an awful secret. After many of years in need of a revival, a new Tomb Raider game was launched in 2013, taking us to the origins of this pistol wielding archaeologist/thief. Jokes about DD pixels became obsolete;...