New Movies

Just a couple of reviews this week, both from my catch up on 2018 titles. Megan Leavey In this fact based drama, Kate Mara plays Megan Leavey, who, at 20, joins the Marines out of a sense that her life isn’t going anywhere. She ends up training as a dog handler, paired with a bomb clearing dog named Rex. Megan and Rex are injured while clearing a field of mines. In danger and with another dog unit hours away, they...

Del (Peter Dinklage) is pretty sure he’s the last man on Earth. When we meet him there has been an unspecified catastrophe, in which it seems everyone simply collapsed and died. Del, alone, works his way around his nameless town, going house to house, cleaning up and burying the bodies he finds. One day he sees fireworks going off outside the library he used to work at and now makes his home in. This leads him to meet Grace (Elle...

The second instalment in J.K. Rowling’s five part Fantastic Beasts story sees director David Yates at the helm once again, in this well acted if ultimately lacklustre sequel to its critically acclaimed 2016 predecessor, which saw a welcome return to the magical Harry Potter universe. Set a year on from its predecessor, The Crimes Of Grindelwald opens in late 20s New York, where evil wizard Grindelwald has been languishing in an American Ministry of Magic prison, awaiting his trial. When he uses his dark arts to escape, Grindelwald makes his way...

It’s important for a critic to understand and to state their bias, so I should say upfront that I love the original 1977 version of Suspiria. Dario Argento’s hallucinatory masterpiece is one of the most beautiful horror films ever made, and to my mind one of the greatest. This only became clearer with last year’s stunning 4K restoration and Blu Ray release, which made the extraordinary colours leap off the screen like never before. Given my love for the film,...

The Hate U GiveFilm is a reactive medium, but because it is expensive and time consuming to make it’s also often a slow one. The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013 but this year we seem to have seen a glut of films that feel like they are responding to that movement and the reasons it exists. The Hate U Give, based on Angie Thomas’ 2017 novel is perhaps the most direct of these films, as it spotlights how...

I’m not fond of the tendency to label any interesting new anime director as ‘the next Miyazaki’. Partly this is because I’m a far bigger fan of the Studio Ghibli films by other directors but it also just strikes me as an easy crutch, and to apply it to filmmakers who are as individual in their vision and as different from each other and Miyazaki as Makoto Shinkai (Garden of Words, Your Name) and Mirai director Mamoru Hosoda doesn’t feel...

Welcomes to a new series on TLE Film. Here, each week, our film writers will have free rein to spotlight a few of the films they've seen recently in capsule reviews. The films could be from this week, they could be from the silent era. Hopefully our week in movies can provide a varied selection of ideas for your future weeks in movies. Candyman Candyman is about many things and gory killings are mostly the vehicle for them rather than...

The Halloween franchise has taken many forms since the first film was released in 1978. In the subsequent years there have been no fewer than seven sequels, two reboots, several novels, and a series of comics. Rather than tangling itself in the franchise’s messy back catalogue, director David Gordon Green pretends that the underwhelming attempts to bring life back into the series never happened. The latest incarnation of Halloween acts as a direct sequel to the original and takes place exactly 40 years after...

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...