• Joker

    October 7, 2019 - By 

    Joker lands in cinemas this week – as heavy with hype as Batman’s toolbelt with gadgets. Not that gadgets and superheroism play a big part in this origin story, which shows the backstory of Batman’s arch-nemesis. Instead, following in the footsteps of the violent adaptations Logan and Deadpool, Joker is a bracingly bleak, gorgeously shot departure from the conventions of the comic book spin-off movie, anchored (if not dominated) by a magnetic central performance from Joaquin Phoenix. The film unfolds in a 1970s-feel Gotham City that’s politically and socially tearing itself apart. (The first evidence of unrest is mounds of uncollected…

  • Dunkirk

    July 20, 2017 - By 

    Dunkirk, one of the summer’s most hyped and star-strewn aspiring blockbusters, is about that iconic crossroads moment of the early Second World War: the attempted evacuation in 1940 of nearly half a million British, French and Belgian soldiers from the titular French beach. Cut off from air support, surrounded by the German army, bombed to breaking point by the Luftwaffe – and with the safe haven of Dover less than thirty miles away – the Allies face catastrophe. A desperate evacuation strategy is mounted over land, sea and air that enlists not only the Allied forces but also British civilians…

  • Certain Women

    March 3, 2017 - By 

    [This review contains mild plot spoilers] I wasn’t surprised to discover, just a few hours after watching Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, that the film’s three, loosely connected narratives were adapted from a collection of short stories. (The author of these stories is Maile Meloy, and the collection from which they’re drawn is called Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.) Like a good short story, each of Certain Women’s segments offers a concise but rich glimpse into other lives, places and experiences. And, while each part could easily stand alone as a minor-key indie drama, they interlock in…

  • T2 Trainspotting

    February 3, 2017 - By 

    Danny Boyle’s oddly-titled T2 Trainspotting is a Jonny-cum-lately [sic] sequel to the cult 1996 film. T2 picks up the threads of the saga some twenty years after the events of the first film (or T1, as I’ll call it), stitching together original elements from a screenplay by John Hodge with some bits of the novel Porno, Irvine Welsh’s sequel to his breakthrough 1993 novel. So, having ripped off his friends and fled to the Netherlands at the end of the first film, Renton (Ewan McGregor), returns to haunt Leith, the backdrop of T1’s lurid, heroin-fuelled events. Renton presents himself as…

  • Loving

    February 2, 2017 - By 

    I could probably relate Loving quite easily to the colossal shitstorm currently raging in the United States as a result of the rise to power of the man Dan Savage memorably calls ‘Orange Julius Caesar’. I could tease out the parallels between the mid-twentieth century America of Loving, in which laws are used to deny peoples’ humanity, and Trump’s new playground. But that’s a rant best suited to Twitter, or maybe the pub. In any case, Loving offers a much more convincing and compassionate response to the politics of hate than me and my bleeding heart, wringing hands and jerking…

  • Jackie

    January 18, 2017 - By 

    Translating the life of a famous figure to film is notoriously hard to pull off. For every biopic like Capote there’s an Iron Lady; for every Milk, The Doors. Even without the prospect of a leather-clad Val Kilmer to sink a film’s prospects, biopics can all too readily fall foul of audiences: the shopworn rags-to-riches (or maybe rags-to-riches-to-drugs) tropes of the likes of Walk the Line have been ferociously mocked in parodies such as Walk Hard. Kudos to director Pablo Larraín, then, for attempting two biopics in two years. From Larraín, who directed last year’s much admired biopic Neruda (dealing…