Film Reviews

Based on Duncan Falconer’s book The Hostage, Stratton follows John Stratton (Dominic Cooper), a Special Boat Service operative, who along with a secret services team is trying to intercept a batch of deadly biochemical weapons. The weapons find their way into the hands of former Soviet operative Grigory Barovsky (Thomas Kretschmann) who plans to drop them on London and there is only limited time for Stratton to stop him. Dominic Cooper tries his best in the central role but the...

By Michael McNulty Released in 1951, Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet was the first Korean War film ever made. Fuller’s third feature, made on a budget of roughly $ 100,000, was a smash hit with audiences and grossed over $ 2 million at the box office. Many a great war film owes a credit to The Steel Helmet.  In the wake of World War Two, Hollywood churned out films where conflict was easily defined and compartmentalised into good vs. evil. ...

The streets of Victorian East London must have been a pretty scary place. Before the trendy bars and artisan coffee shops, it was full of dark alleyways, smoky air, questionable characters, and of course murder. It is the latter that The Limehouse Golem is concerned with. Set in Victorian London, Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy) is tasked with catching the notorious Golem murderer, who has struck terror throughout the Limehouse district of the city. When John Cree (Sam Reid) is...

By Michael McNulty Francis Lee’s debut feature film, God’s Own Country, is a delicate and hopeful love story, an intimate portrayal of a budding romance deep in rural Yorkshire that will likely draw comparisons to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.  But, there is nothing derivate about this Yorkshire set film. Johnny (Josh O’Connor) shoulders the weight of his family’s ailing farm, his father, Martin (Ian Hart), unable to work as a result of a stroke.  The young man’s life is defined...

Steven Soderbergh, once dubbed the poster boy of the Sundance generation by legendary critic Roger Ebert, makes his return from a short-lived ‘movie retirement’ with Logan Lucky – a wacky, redneck, Ocean’s Eleven-esque crime comedy. Soderbergh enlists a trio of brawny heartthrobs - in the shape of Daniel Craig, Channing Tatum and Adam Driver – in an attempt to guarantee his comeback doesn’t fall short of the mark, and it almost pays off. Tatum, more rotund than ever, is a...

By James Mackney Move aside Minions, for 'Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie' is the family film of the summer. It has everything: fart jokes, an arch villain who looks like a cross between Albert Einstein and Professor Weetos, sly and silly cultural references and a caped-crusader - in just his underpants! It is a film that unashamedly celebrates the sheer creativity of children’s imaginations. Within the first 10 minutes there is a joke about Uranus being a gas giant....

By Michael McNulty Director of Heli, Amat Escalante’s latest offering is a strange cocktail of genres, part social-realist drama and part erotic, magical sci-fi. Set in the Mexican city of Guanajuato, The Untamed draws inspiration from a homophobic newspaper clipping about a gay hospital worker who was murdered. Centring on a working class family, Alejandra (Ruth Ramos), mother of two is the wife of Ángel (Jesus Meza), a sexually repressed homosexual who is having an affair with Alejandra’s brother Fabián...

By Anna Power There’s no doubt that this best-selling teen romance novel now brought to the screen is a film of two distinct halves. The first is a very pleasant teen love story, which charms and captivates, the second sees the onset of a plot about to take a nose dive into territory that’s a whole lot tougher to swallow - no matter how hard you try. They say that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and...

The Century 16 massacre of 2012, where a lone gunman, James Holmes, entered a packed cinema auditorium in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and began shooting – leaving 12 people dead and another 70 injured – forms the stimulus from which indie writer/director Tim Sutton soulfully sketches a portrait of suburban malaise in this hauntingly existential examination of contemporary America. It’s best to ignore the blunt tactlessness of the title; Sutton’s manner is measured...