• Twice Shy

    July 11, 2017 - By 

    The pressure on so-called ‘issue’ films to ‘start a conversation’, as the journo cliche goes, or, at least, to contribute to existing dialogue, can feel like an unfair burden. Good films are more nuanced than the message we would like to hear from them, and it’s hard to predict what kind of reactions they might provoke from wider audiences. Also, more crucially, meaningful conversations are just plain difficult things to have. To its credit, Irish indie Twice Shy, the second feature from Tipperary-born Tom Ryan, acknowledges this difficulty, and places the troubles of its characters ahead of its eye-catching subject…

  • Gifted

    June 14, 2017 - By 

    Let’s do the sums. You have a precocious little girl, a child prodigy who speaks to adults with cute sassiness + a custody courtroom battle with emotional speeches + an aggressively insistent soundtrack + the director of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Marc Webb). When you run the numbers, Gifted should be insufferable. But it’s not. It’s a minor movie, sure, but a sweet one. Chris Evans plays Frank, a salt of the earth guy who wears baseball caps and fixes boats on the Florida coast and looks after his niece Mary (McKenna Grace), thrust into his care as an infant…

  • My Cousin Rachel

    June 13, 2017 - By 

    The fiction of mid-century English author Daphne du Maurier has inspired some of cinema’s most sinister highlights, the most admired being Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds. Written and directed by Roger Michell, this new adaptation of her 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel is the first film treatment since Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland’s romance a year after publication. Michell is maybe best known as the director of rom-com smash Notting Hill, and much of his work since, like frothy breakfast show comedy Morning Glory or Bill Murray’s FDR turn in Hyde Park on Hudson, has stuck to middle of…

  • The Mummy

    June 12, 2017 - By 

    As far as real-world parallels to contemporary studio franchising go, if Wonder Woman is Corbyn’s Labour revival — an optimistic, youthful reprieve from what’s come before — then The Mummy, the opening salvo for Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’, is surely Theresa May’s bungled Brexit power grab, a rash, self-deluded project that stutters and shuffles in a mimicry of flesh and blood realness, before succumbing to a fit of shambolic self-immolation. Lustfully eyeing the returns coming in for Disney and Warner Bros’ shared superhero universes, Universal has brought their monster squad properties back from the dead, opened their cheque books to tempt bankable, if fading, stars,…

  • Wonder Woman

    June 5, 2017 - By 

    Diana, Princess of the Amazons, is here to save the world, or at least the DC Cinematic Universe. “They don’t deserve you”, coos her arch-nemesis, the war-mongering Aries, referring to the flaky humans Diana has abandoned Paradise to help. He may as well be speaking about the creative team at Warner Bros and DC Films, who have thus far battered and demoralised eager audiences with dour, cynical, wildly plotted movies. They don’t deserve Diana, but she’s here anyway. The 2017 blockbuster most destined to be damned by faint praise, Wonder Woman breaks from the DC pack by provoking a reaction…

  • Colossal

    May 23, 2017 - By 

    Colossal, Spanish film-maker Nacho Vigalondo’s biggest film yet, is a quirky genre-bender with a fatal credibility problem, one entirely unrelated to its central conceit, a preposterous, cute premise engineered to attract eyeballs across the indie-blockbuster divide. Anne Hathaway exec produces and stars as Gloria, a thirty-something party girl dumped by her boyfriend (a condescending Dan Stevens) after one all-nighter too many. With no job or place to stay, she has to leave New York for the family home, which lies empty and unused in her small childhood town. While trying to sort her head out and organise something comfortable to…

  • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

    May 22, 2017 - By 

    Blimey! If you thought giving Guy Ritchie a go at Camelot mythology was a silly idea, you’re in company: every inch of the film seems to agree with you. After some opening titles that look like they’ve been designed on Windows 95, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (even the subtitle is naff) opens in a fantasy version of Ye Olde Past. It’s basically Game of Thrones without the realpolitik: squires and mages and giant, CGI elephants controlled by a guy in a hood named Mordred. To be fair to Ritchie, he doesn’t mince around, attacking the Arthurian mythos with…

  • Box Office Blues: When The Storm Comes, Take Shelter

    May 18, 2017 - By 

    Take Shelter, from writer/director Jeff Nichols, is a movie that examines the difficult issue of mental health with tender hands and great care. Nichols is quickly becoming, if not already considered to be, one of the great American story tellers. His partnership with Michael Shannon has spanned over several films and has reaped great rewards. Take Shelter is for me his finest piece of his work to date. Shannon play Curtis who is, frankly, just a normal man, a blue collar worker with a young family and a dog in the back yard behind the white picket fence. There is…

  • Box Office Blues: Cinema as a Kind of Therapy

    May 17, 2017 - By 

    When I got depressed I would go to the movies. No doubt for many people the idea of sitting in the dark, on their own, in the middle of day, is itself depressing. ‘All by himself — how sad’. I’m also sure, though, that fellow pilgrims can relate to its pleasures, a solitary indulgence that is utterly pleasant at the best of times, and potentially restorative at the worst. There are, first, a bunch of very basic, practical mental health benefits to going to the movies, not all of them replicable with a Netflix subscription. You have to put on jeans and…

  • Snatched

    May 12, 2017 - By 

    Snatched begins with Amy Schumer, her second leading role after 2015’s Trainwreck, in a familiar comic persona from her standup, film and TV work: the Messy White Girl, whose oblivious, entitled sense of privilege is expressed with a malice-free, faint irony. Emily (Schumer) is fired from her retail job (after a funny bait-and-switch with screenwriter Katie Dippold) and dumped by her rockstar boyfriend, responding to the slights with hurt, haughty denial. Left with no-one to join her on a non-refundable resort trip to Ecuador, and conveniently moved by memories of her divorced homebody mother (Goldie Hawn) in happier, more fun-loving…