• The Favourite

    January 4, 2019 - By 

    Court is in session in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, a spectacular re-dressing of the period costume drama and savage comedy of manners about people who barely have any. It’s early 18th century England in Queen Anne’s palace. Off-screen, over on the mainland there’s a war with France to fund (there was always a war with France), but home is where the real hostilities are flaring up. Upstart crow Abigail Hill (Emma Stone at her most compelling) is the ruthless social climber cousin of the reigning royal favourite Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), the Cheney-like whisperer who basically runs the country for the…

  • Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

    December 21, 2018 - By 

    Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is the best super-hero film in at least ten years because it understands what drew our shy, fifteen-year old selves to comics in the first place, and what has been missing, at a fundamental level, from the cinematic work of D.C. and Marvel: delight. Delight in what comics look like and how they move; delight in the rich, weirdo possibilities of the comics universe, where men decked in primary colours make earnest speeches about saving the world; delight in how it feels to be a kid who finds out he can run up the sides of…

  • 2018 in Film: 35 Highlights of The Year

    December 21, 2018 - By 

    To mark the end of 2018, we’ve sent our film writers rummaging through their scrapbooks for the year’s highlights. Here are the moments, scenes, performances and film-making achievements that we just couldn’t shake. 1. The ballroom scene in The Square In The Square, Ruben Östlund sets about unpicking the false civility of the modern urban beta male (Cales Bang’s museum director) with slow precision. But then, about two-thirds of the way through, he sets off a firework, in which a hulking performance artist (Terry Notary) goes full simian during a high society dinner, baboon screeches, smashing crockery and eventually grabbing a woman…

  • Aquaman

    December 14, 2018 - By 

    Water disappointment. The party line of D.C. diehards, at least until Wonder Woman’s well-received idealism, was that their films offered “dark” or “serious” stories in contrast to Marvel’s fast-talking raccoons. But that description always fell way short of capturing the fundamental experience of watching films like Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice or Suicide Squad: one of pure bafflement. The folks at D.C.’s film factory have proved themselves, again and again, to be accidental artisans of “wait, what?” cinema. The DCU is basically the Brexit of the modern multiplex: supposedly smart, competent professionals making a series of very bad decisions…

  • The Old Man & The Gun

    December 7, 2018 - By 

    If you had to be robbed by anyone, you’d want to be robbed by Robert Redford. He’d flash his holster, give you a knowing nod, and lay on that wiley Texan charm, the undiminished, easy-going confidence. You’d hand over your bank card and apologise for your shitty overdraft. “No problem,” he’d smile. Based on the real-life exploits of Forrest Tucker, a serial bank robber and prison escape artist, The Old Man & The Gun is a light-hearted, light-footed crime comedy caper about the Sundance Kid refusing to go gently into that good night. After having made his way out of…

  • Sorry To Bother You

    December 3, 2018 - By 

    Those who know Lakeith Stanfield, the reluctant hero of hip-hop artist Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You, probably do so from his scene-stealing turns in Donald Glover’s Atlanta as the bleary-eyed, conspiracy-promoting Darius, who seems to drift in and out of this dimension and the next. The show, aired on FX, is a rare one clued in to the absurdies and comic challenges of life on the lowest rung, where solid structures can melt away, like a nightclub wall that revolves when your back is turned. Sorry To Bother You, which stars Stanfield as a low-level telemarketer who shoots up…

  • Creed II

    November 30, 2018 - By 

    Rocky is a hero because he got up. And so is Sylvester Stallone. The franchise he’s been shepherding for half a century just keeps going. But sometimes it’s okay to just not take the fight, even when the crowd’s singing for it. 2015’s punchy, nimble Creed successfully re-orientated the Balboa brand around a new generation, Michael B. Jordan putting in a powerhouse performance as the son of Apollo. Hollywood franchises may be folding in on themselves like Inception’s boulevards, but thanks to the energies of regular collaborators Ryan Coogler and Jordan, Creed was the best example of a studio franchise embracing…

  • The Meeting

    November 21, 2018 - By 

    An uncommon encounter conducted in the keys of grace and dignity, Irish drama The Meeting puts the mechanics of restorative justice on screen in the year’s most extraordinary blurring of fiction and reality. While walking from the bus stop to her Dublin family home one summer night, 21 year-old Ailbhe Griffith is suddenly grabbed from behind and dragged into bushes. Her attacker, who got off the bus behind her, then subjects her to a horrific sexual assault, biting, punching, scratching and penetrating her. “Not so glamorous now”, he hisses. Two passers-by intervene and chase off the perpetrator, very likely saving…

  • Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2018 Film Review

    November 21, 2018 - By 

    Christopher Honoré’s Sorry Angel is an AIDS film where the presence of the virus comes through in tone and colour rather than political sentiment. The writer and director bathes the interiors and costuming of his cross-generational French romance in hues of blue. It is the colour of melancholy, of the autumn sky just before the light gives out — and, crucially, of hospital wards. Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a mildly successful but emotionally withdrawn Parisian novelist (imagine!) who is HIV positive but still in reasonably good health. But it’s the 1990s, and so his condition is more or less fatal. He has…

  • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

    November 16, 2018 - By 

    Not since The Hobbit has a studio franchise spin-off so thoroughly dropped the ball. The similarities between Peter Jackson’s 9-hour pilgrimage to the Lonely Mountain and the Fantastic Beasts trilogy, two in with The Crimes of Grindelwald, are immediate and obvious. Both series take a charming little throwaway book, J. K. Rowling’s 2001 Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the real-life rendition of Hogwarts’ zoological textbook, and mount them on the rack, stretching them out until the joints give out. It’s gruesome textual torture. Close your eyes and whisper along with me: disapparate, disapparate, disapparate. Like An Unexpected Journey, Fantastic Beasts started…