Film

Directed by Corin Hardy, the new instalment in what is now being referred to as the “Conjuring Universe" is a rather stale and scare-free affair that’s only just slightly rescued by its female lead’s incredible screen presence, and remarkable performance. Written by Gary Dauberman (It, Annabelle) from a story by James Wan, The Nun offers more of the same old tropes and hackneyed ideas we’ve come to expected from this hugely lucrative and admittedly very popular franchise, but in the end the film fails to bring anything new to...

Over the past couple of years there has been a growing conversation about representation in film. The Miseducation of Cameron Post isn’t the first coming of age film about an LGBT teen (indeed, it’s enough of a subgenre to have its own established cliches), nor is it the first of those to deal with ‘conversion therapy’ (1999’s But I’m A Cheerleader, also directed by a queer woman, looks at a similar situation with a more comedic eye). It is, however,...

It is the first time the jacket has gone under the hammer since Harrison Ford wore it in the 1980 instalment of the popular Star Wars saga, The Empire Strikes Back.

Kicking off this year’s Venice International Film Critics’ Week is Indian fantasy-horror Tumbbad. From the go, it quickly becomes apparent that Tumbbad is on course to serve as a parable for the corrupting nature of greed.  Narration tells us, as we sweep over the bleak, rain-sodden countryside of Tumbadd in the far reaches of western India, the legend of Hastar, a God undone by his own his avarice. Rahi Anil Barve and co-director Adesh Prasad have crafted a film with the ambitions...

To kick off this year's London Film Festival coverage, we're trying something new for TLE. In this audio preview, I sat down with lapsed critic, fellow film fanatic and my friend Timothy E Raw. We went through the programme and picked one film each from every section to discuss (and sometimes argue about). Over these couple of hours we discussed 32 of the more than 200 films that will be showing across London venues from the 10th to the 21st...

Hermann Vaske attempts to tackle why we are creative in his newest documentary of the same name. Beneath the thin veneer this documentary, helmed by a director who believes he has cast off into the waters of the great thinkers in his pursuit of a single truth to an unanswerable question, is a film clearly dreamt up by advertising exec.  Slick, stylised, but ultimately lacking in imaginative energy, it is the kind of “creative content,” that has been perfected by marketers,...

Eric Jaskolka, from USA has collected over 20,000 X-Men items

For my money, one of the major new cinematic talents discovered in recent years was not an actor, a director or a screenwriter but 37-year-old cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who was camera operator on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Zal stepped in as DP just after just a few days when Ryszard Lenczewski left the film. It could have been said that Lenczewski laid the foundation for that gorgeous film but with this, his second collaboration with Pawlikowski, I think a solid argument...

Adapted from Victor Headley’s novel of the same name, Yardie is set predominately in the 1980s and opens in Jamaica. It is here that we find Dennis (Aml Ameen), a young man who runs errands for mob boss King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Dennis spends his days stumbling his way through small jobs while plotting revenge on his brother Jerry’s (Everaldo Creary) killer. Believing he can trust him, Fox asks Dennis to deliver a package of cocaine to his distributor in...