• Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle

    August 18, 2017 - By 

    In 2015’s Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain, film-maker Paul Sng used the Nottingham duo to tell a story about British working class discontent in the age of austerity. His new film, Dispossession: The Great Housing Swindle, takes a longer historical perspective, aiming to examine the failures and dysfunctions of modern British housing. As Maxine Peak’s narration outlines, post-war liberalism championed the country’s new council estates as fulfillments of a democratic promise, ambitious concrete guarantors of secure and dignified shelter. How, the documentary asks, did we get to the present moment, when the term ‘council estate’ is mouthed with a sneer? How…

  • Everything, Everything

    August 18, 2017 - By 

    The heroine of young-adult romance Everything, Everything, adapted from Nicola Yoon’s novel of the same name, lives in a bubble. Thanks to a complicated autoimmune condition, Maddie (Amandla Stenberg) is vulnerable to the common bacteria bugs of everyday life. For Maddie’s own protection, her mother, a doctor and her only living family, keeps her inside their specially designed, expensive-looking, air-sealed house. After she got sick as an infant, she’s never ventured outside the home. So she stays inside, reading books and blogs about them on her nice Mac, while dreaming of a life outside of the see-through walls. In concept,…

  • England is Mine

    August 17, 2017 - By 

    Present-day fans of The Smiths, embarrassed by Morrissey’s descent into unfashionableness, usually preface their admiration with the disclaimer that it’s ‘about the music, not the man’. England is Mine provides the reverse: the man, not the music. Mark Gill’s unlicensed biopic is a portrait of the artist as a moody young man, covering the early stages of Steven Patrick Morrissey’s artistic development, before he began building his first tracks with Johnny Marr (Laurie Kynaston). Basically, it’s a music biopic without the music; in a genre well known for coasting on familiar beats, this is, at least, something new. Played by…

  • Land of Mine

    August 11, 2017 - By 

    World War 2 films could be seen to have been at saturation point for quite some time but writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s (The Model) new drama Land Of Mine proves that there is still plenty of mileage in the genre, with a tale that sheds light on a very controversial time period in Denmark’s history, while also dealing with age old themes of revenge and forgiveness with stark authenticity. Set just after WW2, Land Of Mine tells the story of a group of surrendered German soldiers, all of whom are young boys from the Hitler Youth, who are ordered to demine the…

  • Annabelle: Creation

    August 8, 2017 - By 

    Someone call a priest. It’s last rites time. Studio horror is dead, or at least consistent in its undeadness; zombie movies, creaking bags of tricks with empty centres, haunted bodies without spirit. Warner Bros’ prequel-spinoff Annabelle: Creation, which sets up the origin story for the titular haunted doll of 2014’s lifeless Annabelle, confirms this. The latest offshoot from James Wan’s highly successful, ever expanding The Conjuring franchise (future releases include The Conjuring 3 and spinoffs The Nun and The Crooked Man), Creation is a box-ticking exercise with zero dread and a reminder of how essential the personalities of Patrick Wilson…

  • Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

    August 4, 2017 - By 

    Modern blockbuster film-making is calling out for a new The Fifth Element, but Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets isn’t it. Two decades after Luc Besson’s classically garish retro-future space opera, he’s returned to the same aesthetic; it’s another summer film based on a comic book, sure, but not what you would expect. Valerian is based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, which began its run in the pre-Star Wars sixties. Besson, a long-time fan of the series, obviously drew on it for 1997’s weirdo favourite, and…

  • Hounds of Love

    August 2, 2017 - By 

    For his debut feature, Australian film-maker Ben Young returns to his Perth roots, subjecting his hometown to a predator’s gaze. Psychological abduction thriller Hounds of Love opens with a pervs-eye view of teenage girls playing netball, the slow-motion camera tracking bodily curves and the wafting of skirts while a couple watch from their car, and then offer one of the unfortunate girls a lift home. Later in the film, as the depravity of the married kidnappers becomes clearer, a tracking shot line-up of unassuming detached houses frames the buildings as hostile sites, the carefree, slow-mo routines of family life now…

  • Captain Underpants

    July 31, 2017 - By 

    Unsurprising news: Captain Underpants is a silly movie. Surprising news: it’s also not bad. Based on Dav Pilkey’s popular children’s novels of the same name and directed by David Soren (Turbo), DreamWorks’ Captain Underpants pretty much comes as advertised: it’s about a big, dumb guy in Y-fronts and a cape. Like the book series, the Underpants movie centres on two fourth-grade best friends and neighbours, George Beard (Kevin Hart) and Harold Hutchkins (Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch), and their efforts to inject a bit of life into their grim middle school existence, under the authoritarian grip of principal Mr. Krupp (Ed…

  • Girls Trip

    July 28, 2017 - By 

    Some movies are made for audiences. Not in a buck-passing ‘we made it for the fans, not the critics’ way that follows deserved Tomatometer mauling. It’s rather that in certain contexts, a movie’s qualities can be amplified, and its flaws made to seem less important. The Fifty Shades movies, for example, were marketed as ‘events’, a go-to destination for gaggles of girlfriends on a tipsy, fizzy Friday night out (there were, you may recall, ~scenes~). But the movies themselves — weirdly sexless, soap-opera slow, self-serious mood rock — didn’t live up to this promise. New mad-weekend comedy Girls Trip, though, does: on Netflix it…

  • It Comes At Night

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    It is a wonderful thing when Hollywood actually develops some backbone and throws their weight behind filmmakers like writer/director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha). His latest genre bending horror, It Comes At Night, is incredibly brave filmmaking, as even the title is deceptively chosen – some might call it false advertising. This is an intelligent and tautly crafted horror, with its base set in the dystopian nightmare genre, but there will undoubtedly be detractors who may feel shortchanged by the elusiveness in showing what the ‘It’ fully entails. Set at a time of mass extinction for the human race, Joel Edgerton (The Gift)…