New Movies

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...

In real life Columbus, Indiana is a rather unassuming small city located in the American heart land. With a population of around 50,000 people it would be easy to overlook Columbus in favour of the larger and more recognisable cities that can be found not too far away. Academic turned filmmaker Kogonada’s debut film can at first seem a little modest but it doesn’t take long to appreciate the depth and wisdom that Columbus contains. The film centres on a friendship between Jin (John Cho), an American living in...

In Venom, Sony’s latest Marvel offering, director Ruben Fleischer and his writing team seem to have completely failed to grasp the fact that the world has moved on from the old superhero tropes of two-dimensional characters and half-baked ideas that relied too often on a lazy premise and even lazier dialogue. This shift in attitude could be attributed to a number of things, but if we’re going to be completely honest, most of it falls back on the way Disney have handled...

1937. 1954. 1976. 2018. A Star Is Born has had a version for almost every generation of cinema, and the pull of its story can travel across eras with ease. In Bradley Cooper's latest version, he takes the '76 approach of transferring the story to purely music: self-destructive star Jackson Maine (Cooper) stumbles into a back street bar one day in search of more booze. There he comes across a performer in Ally (Lady Gaga) that fascinates him, and one he wants...

Having made her debut with stranger than fiction doc The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle appears to have almost literally stumbled on the genesis of her first fiction feature. She ran in to the all girl skateboarding crew Skate Kitchen on the New York subway and, fascinated by them, bought them coffee and began to hang out with them. This led initially to the short film That One Day and eventually to this film; a blend of fact and fiction with the...

In Björn Runge’s The Wife, Glenn Close offers a truly outstanding performance as the long suffering wife of an insufferably vain novelist (played by Jonathan Pryce). Adapted for the screen by Jane Anderson from Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel of the same name, the film is a beautifully understated, thought provoking and deeply affecting study in codependency and deceit, which is only slightly let down by a needlessly stagey style. After nearly forty years of marriage, Joan and Joe Castleman (Close and Pryce) seem very happy...

Kate Novack has all the necessary ingredients for a fascinating study of one of the fashion world’s seminal players in her documentary, The Gospel According to André.  Sadly, however, Novack never quite manages to get under the skin of the films titular subject, and the end result leaves little food for thought. The Gospel According to André chronicles the rise of the larger than life, both in character and physical stature, fashion editor André Leon Talley from the segregated south to the fitting rooms and runways...

Faces Places has a brilliantly simple premise. The film follows photographer JR and legendary film director Agnès Varda as they travel to small French towns and photograph the people they find there. The photos they take are in turn used to create large murals which are plastered onto nearby buildings. Through doing this JR and Varda speak to members of the local communities and learn about their lives and what makes these places tick. They are able to seek out fellow eccentrics and their conversations can be both bizarre and insightful....

In A Simple Favor, director Paul Feig offers a riotously funny, stylish and beautifully well observed Gone Girl-esque mystery thriller which somehow manages to be funnier and far more engaging than it has any right to be. Adapted by Jessica Sharzer form Darcey Bell's 2017 novel of the same name, the film mixes brilliantly acerbic one-liners and an impeccable visual style to tell a cleverly thought-out story of mystery and intrigue. And if that wasn’t enough, we are also treated to two fantastic performances courtesy of...