New Movies

By Linda Marric One minute into the credits of Kong: Skull Island and you can’t help but smile, because you know this isn’t going to be one of “those” monster films with unending battle scenes and little else. So if you were expecting a testosterone drenched blockbuster a la Michael Bay, rest assured that this is nothing of the sort. Produced by the same team who brought us Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014), Kong: Skull Island not so much borrows but...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel A montage near the end jumps through a diverse collection of fans explaining what heavy metal band X Japan means to them. Aside from adoration in their homeland, others from around the world express admiration, ranging from people who used their music to deal with dark emotions to an elderly woman attending her first concert since Elvis. It’s a hint of what could have been in a shallow and otherwise amiable documentary that skates through the...

Wyndham Hacket Pain @WyndhamHP It takes some time to adjust to the accents of the characters in Trespass Against Us, not because they are difficult to understand, but because gangsters and criminals are not meant to sound like this. The rural west of England is not the traditional location for such dramas, which are much more accustomed to bleak inner city areas. There is a strange juxtaposition between the idyllic countryside and the brutish behaviour of the Cutler family. The...

By Linda Marric @linda_marric Kelly Reichardt’s films are beautifully crafted poetic pieces feature unusual stories about unusual people. By her own admission, her films are “glimpses of people passing through”. Reichardt’s painstakingly long takes and repetitive quotidian scenes are what makes her productions into masterpieces of modern cinema. The Night Moves’ director is back with another understated study of rural America with the critically acclaimed Certain Women. The film, which won Best Film at last year’s London Film Festival is...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel It’s easy to get carried away thinking of films as art, but sometimes it’s just a job. Southern Fury highlights this point, rounding up Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and Adrien Grenier, all of whom can surely only be in this dire thriller for the paycheck. Lacking just about all the ingredients required to make something watchable; Steven C. Miller’s film has to fall back on Cage in a ridiculous wig and fake nose to find any...

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Tomato red is almost the colour of Jamalee Merridew’s hair, and it’s the name of the Daniel Woodrell novel from which this film is adapted. Woodrell has written nine novels to date, a number of them set in the bleak forgotten lands of the Ozarks; mountainous country crossing over Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. There’s clearly something cinematic about his work because two previous novels became the excellent Ride with the Devil (1999) and Winter’s Bone (2010)....

By Stephen Mayne @finalreel Massimo is a man who should have it all. He lives in a world of elegant apartments and swanky parties before heading out to fashion shows, football games, and war zones, the varied diet that comes with his journalism job. Yet for a man living such an interesting life, he’s not actually lived a single minute of it. Sweet Dreams is a surface deep attempt to show how childhood trauma can destabilise everything that follows. Marco...

It is easy to get caught up in the annual awards coverage and forget that entries are films, and not just news stories. Articles surrounding Hidden Figures have placed a large emphasis on its diverse cast and how it is somehow an antidote to the failings of last year’s nominations. All this attention seems rather unfair, as it ignores the merits and qualities that are on display in this film. Set in 1960s Virginia, where racism and sexism were generally...

By Wyndham Hacket Pain With a McDonald’s seemingly in every town centre and motorway service centre in the world it’s hard to imagine a time before the fast-food chain. Whether in the small island of Réunion off Madagascar or the Negev Desert in Israel you know the familiar burger and fries is never too far away. Over the last 60 years, McDonald’s has not just become one the world’s most recognisable and ironic products, but has also come to feed...