• 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,…

  • My Life As A Courgette

    June 7, 2017 - By 

    Children’s films don’t come much finer than My Life As A Courgette, simply because of how in tune and empathetic debut director Claude Barras and writer Celine Sciamma (Girlhood) are charting the trials and tribulations of being a kid growing up, especially when broken homes and traumatic childhoods are involved. There is a level of intelligence, sensitivity and realism throughout that sets it on a level all of its own, but most of all, it lets the children’s (quite often hilarious) perspective do the talking at all times, making it a true breath of fresh air. Courgette is a young…

  • 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…

  • Miss Sloane

    May 31, 2017 - By 

    Miss Sloane is the perfect vehicle for an actress of Jessica Chastain’s calibre. She absolutely runs the show in the no-nonsense manner that has gained her a reputation as one of the finest actresses in Hollywood. Unfortunately, director John Madden (Shakespeare In Love) and first-time writer Johnathan Perera have brought little else to the table in this implausible and relatively predictable story, based around the corrupt and high stakes world of US lobbying. Chastain stars as Elizabeth Sloane, the most sought-after lobbyist in the US and darling of all the high-powered players in politics and business. Her ruthlessness and cunning…

  • 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…

  • Jawbone

    May 19, 2017 - By 

    There is no doubt that Jawbone, director Thomas Q. Napper’s debut, follows many of the usual tropes that most of the boxing/fighting movies out there fall into. You could even say that its subplot, dealing with first time writer and star, Johnny Harris’ (Gangster No 1) alcohol addiction, is a formula that has been flogged to death in this genre. However, what gives Jawbone an edge over the rest is its superb cast and acting, the brutally honest and realistic manner in which it deals with addiction, depression and societal decay, along with a refreshing lack of glorification surrounding its premise.…

  • Raw

    May 15, 2017 - By 

    The French rarely fail to impress on at least some level with their film-making. Their absolute disregard for cultural taboos is something that I’ve always admired but with Raw, you could be forgiven for initially thinking that you are watching exploitation cinema at its most gratuitous and possibly grating. To my surprise, writer/director Julia Ducournau’s debut feature turns out to be a deviously sharp horror/social commentary that makes for a carnivorous shocker that is a cut above most others in this genre. Quite the feat! Following in the footsteps of her family, Justine (Garance Marillier) is an aspiring vet and…