• The Ritual

    October 23, 2017 - By 

    With The Ritual, director David Bruckner (VHS) bolsters the recent rise of smart indie horror, bringing together a talented cast to recreate the Adam Nevill novel with suitably unsettling and outright creepy results; one that pays distinct homage to the usual ‘monster in the woods’, jump-scare tropes but still manages to transcend them with an intelligent script, great production and acting and deft directing. On a night out in London, a tight-knit group of five friends’ relationship is rocked when one them is brutally murdered during a robbery. The four remaining mates decide to have an upcoming stag do in…

  • Happy Death Day

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Happy Death Day is a minor slasher remix built around repetition, in a genre already prone to it. Theresa, or ‘Tree’ (Jessica Rothe), is a sorority sister bi-atch who wakes up in a stranger’s dorm bed, hungover and late for class. It’s her birthday, the same as her late mother’s, and she’s in a bad mood, ignoring her Dad’s persistent calls and carrying on with a married professor. She seems to have been in a bad mood for a while. Late that night she gets cornered in a dark underpass on campus by a creep in a buck-toothed baby mask…

  • The Snowman

    October 13, 2017 - By 

    The Snowman is one of those films that has surefire hit written all over it. Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) in the director’s chair, screenwriters with some great films under their belts and a cast that includes the ultra-talented Michael Fassbender (Hunger), Charlotte Gainsborg (Nymphomaniac), J.K Simmons (Whiplash) and Val Kilmer (Heat). So how in Lord’s name this film turns out to be such an absurd, at times hilarious, howler is absolutely baffling. Based on the bestselling book by Jo Nesbo, The Snowman tells the story of a woman who mysteriously disappears on the first night snowfall. The case…

  • Flatliners

    October 12, 2017 - By 

    Right from the get-go, as the opening title and credits roll and the messy CGI effects and warbling audio bites of people talking about near-death experiences nauseatingly assault your senses, you get a sinking feeling that director Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and writer Ben Ripley (Source Code) have created something terrible. Lo and behold, this new take on the 90s non-classic Flatliners will most certainly join the ever-expanding ranks of atrocious remakes that the Hollywood conveyor belt has, in recent times, been churning out with merciless efficiency. Flatliners tells the story of a group of…

  • The LEGO Ninjago Movie

    October 10, 2017 - By 

    While not quite as surefooted as previous cinematic LEGO outings, this family-friendly romp still offers a colourful dose of inspired lunacy. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge that the Ninjago franchise, albeit hugely popular in its minifigure form, is not as appealing as the Batman universe, yet that in itself liberates the filmmakers to try something a little different. At no point does this addition to the LEGO roster claim to be as subversive or slyly satirical as this year’s hilarious puncturing of the Bruce Wayne mythos nor as a piece of animation does it set out to…

  • Blade Runner 2049

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    1982’s Blade Runner was a melancholic neo-noir as impressive for its shapeless sorrow as for its far-reaching influence on sci-fi design and lexicon. In Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples’ transformation of Philip K. Dick’s story, anyone with sense and money had escaped “off-world”, abandoning Earth to broken boys and their broken toys, the hazy urban air thick with the defeatism of gumshoe vice noir. The electric sheep of an Art Deco future-L.A., along with their shepherds and predators, drifted along in a kind of dreamworld, where identity and memory had turned fluid and suspicious, thanks to the Replicants,…

  • The Mountain Between Us

    October 5, 2017 - By 

    The Mountain Between Us, a disaster-romance directed by Hany Abu-Assad and starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is immediately identifiable as a book adaptation (Charles Martin’s 2010 novel). It feels like a lurid-but-chaste paperback you’d find at a train station reading desk, or on your mum’s bedside cabinet. The cover image would be two handsome lovers, wrapped in ski gear, snuggled up against the warm glow of a cabin fire. In other words, the impression here is not of danger, or life-in-the-balance peril. The only real tension is wondering how quickly they’re going to bang. The mountain, in case you…

  • The Work

    September 27, 2017 - By 

    The Work, an intimate observational documentary from Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, features the closest thing to real-life exorcisms you might ever see. In a grey cinder block room in California’s Folsom State Prison, a maximum security jailhouse made famous by Johnny Cash’s blues, small pockets of men sit on fold-up chairs, unspooling their deepest, most complicated feelings. One convict is desperate to let down his guard and mourn his sister. His group form a circle and coach him on breathing and posture, as he stands silent, tense, diving inside to retrieve the pain. Something rumbles up his chest and…

  • Maze

    September 22, 2017 - By 

    Courting controversy is something that filmmakers have to be very wary of in this day and age, and for writer/director Stephen Burke (Happy Ever Afters) and producer Brendan J. Byrne (Bomb Squad Men), there is no escaping it when dealing with as delicate a subject as the true story of the mass breakout of Provisional IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland from one of Europe’s most secure prisons. But what the filmmakers have managed to create is a credible and well-balanced movie that does not glorify the act, though they make no bones about how much of a coup the escape…

  • mother!

    September 22, 2017 - By 

    mother! is a slow burner panic attack. Imagine being an introvert who throws a house party but sets the invitation as Public. You’re trying to scrub Glen’s and Fanta out of the nice rug but there’s a mob in your kitchen, and, suddenly, crash! The sound of plates hitting marble. Or you’re a young woman married to your professor, two decades your senior, and you give, and dote, and adore, but one day you realise he might not need you the way you need him, and that’s terrifying, and the more he withdraws the more desperate you get. Or you’re…