• Prevenge

    February 13, 2017 - By 

    You have to admire Alice Lowe’s (Sightseers) directorial debut for the logistical nightmare of filming it alone. As writer, director and star of Prevenge, she had the insane idea to make a low budget, satirical slasher while 8 months pregnant, making it a labour of love of the most darkly comic and macabre kind. As a pregnant woman named Ruth (Lowe) ruthlessly slices the throat of the obnoxious man who owns a reptile shop, the viewer is left wondering what her motives are – besides him being a complete sleaze. As the story moves along and the deaths pile up,…

  • The Lego Batman Movie

    February 10, 2017 - By 

    Like a naughty teenager banished to his room, Master Bruce has been sulking in his man cave for some time now. A scowling cowling in SEAL Team 6 body armour, wrapped up in martyrdom angst, terrorising Gotham’s criminal class with the try-hard rasp of man who had too many whiskeys the night before, modern cinema’s vision of The World’s Greatest Detective seems a long distance from that introduced by Bob Kane and Bill Finger nearly 80 years ago. Still, the caped crusader’s infinite wardrobe is nothing if not versatile: Bruce Wayne is tailor-made for transformation. And boy is he due…

  • Hacksaw Ridge

    February 10, 2017 - By 

    Hollywood loves a comeback. It’s a narrative that always seems to come into play around awards season and it’s been a longer road back for Mel Gibson than most. Incredibly, it’s been ten years since the Oscar-winning director of Braveheart (1995) last stepped behind the camera on 2006’s Apocalypto; also, not coincidentally, the year of Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade that came after an arrest for drink-driving. Finally, with his new film Hacksaw Ridge, a story steeped in redemption and tolerance, Gibson is ready to stand triumphantly atop the mountain again. Hacksaw Ridge is the tale of real-life World War II veteran…

  • Christine

    February 9, 2017 - By 

    The line ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ marks a key moment in director Antonio Campos’ (Simon Killer) latest movie Christine, about the grim story of US newswoman Christine Chubbuck. Based on real events, this deeply cynical line is delivered in a time when the news started to turn tabloid in the 70s, and sums up much of what the filmmaker is criticising in this shocking, yet intensely mesmerising, depiction of the reporter’s last days. Rebecca Hall (The Gift) stars as Chubbuck, an intelligent but highly strung news reporter whose personal life and career collide, causing her world to spiral out of…

  • 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…

  • Split

    January 29, 2017 - By 

    Split lives up to its title in dividing my opinion right down the middle. I’m not sure whether it’s a load of gratuitous, pseudo psychology nonsense or an entertaining exploitation thriller/horror. Thankfully, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has managed to break out of his disappointing – sometimes awful – run of films since the mid-2000s, by pulling an inspired performance out of James McAvoy (X-Men: First Class) and creating an intriguingly sinister story with a surprising bite in its finale. It may be generic at its core, containing a few too many plot holes, but Split is clearly…

  • xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

    January 23, 2017 - By 

    Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which starred, among others, Vin Diesel, opened with the hero of the film being put out by his enemies not knowing who he was. An inflated sense of ego. A similar feeling occurs while watching xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, directed by D.J. Caruso, except this time it’s the audience who are left wondering why should they know – or care – about the resurrection of a character who’s first cinematic outing was fifteen years ago. There were kids in my screening that weren’t even born fifteen years ago. The extreme sports angle of…

  • 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…

  • La La Land

    January 17, 2017 - By 

    After assaulting our senses with 2014’s furiously frenetic Whiplash, Damien Chazelle sets his sights on our hearts in his new film, the romantic musical, La La Land. It seems the young director’s ambitions know no bounds as he transports audiences back to the era of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in this throwback to Hollywood’s golden age. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star as Sebastian, a talented, but temperamental pianist who dreams of owning his own jazz club, and Mia, an aspiring actress stuck on the never-ending audition carousel in LA. When this pair of down at heel…