• Juliet, Naked

    November 8, 2018 - By 

    Nick Hornby’s most famous surrogate remains Rob Gordon, John Cusack’s musical obsessive in High Fidelity, the patron saint of record store assholes and stalled-adolescent gatekeepers of taste. Hornby has since carved out a strong second career as a screenwriter, but the adaptations of his books continue: easygoing rom-com Juliet, Naked gives us another pop culture snob, played in a less sardonic key, but relegates him to the sideline of the central serendipitous romance. Chris O’Dowd plays Duncan, a media lecturer in a small seaside town outside London who is devoted to the work and mythos of Tucker Crowe, a Jeff Buckley-esque…

  • Widows

    November 7, 2018 - By 

    The arc of the heist movie builds towards triumph and liberation. The thrill of a pulling off the perfect job is the same as performing a magic trick. There’s the plan, even if it’s discarded when things get hairy, and there’s a chance for a losers and rogues to get one back on the system, an impossible now-you-see-it that leaves coppers in an empty vault scratching their heads, stray notes bobbing in the breeze. A well-structured heist movie is one of cinema’s high pleasures. “Pleasure” is not a feeling that Steve McQueen’s work brings to mind: think Fassbender’s cum face…

  • Bohemian Rhapsody

    October 26, 2018 - By 

    Queen’s music is like the air. So if you’re going to give them the biopic treatment, you need to peel back the gloss and the familiarity a little, and give us a peek at the complications, the darkness and the extravagance of an icon like Freddie Mercury. Their tracks have been drilled into the DNA of modern background noise: for Bohemian Rhapsody to feel in any way fresh, it needed risk. It has none. The product of a difficult gestation, Rhapsody arrives after cycling through leads, screenwriters and directors. Bryan Singer gets the sole director credit, but he was fired…

  • Halloween

    October 24, 2018 - By 

    For the Final Girl, nothing’s really final. Laurie Strode might have thought it was game over when a doctor in a raincoat put six holes in the chest of her masked attacker, but Halloween wasn’t even close to done with her. Strapped to the wheel of fate, she was brought back, again and again, for twenty years, enduring more nastiness, more reboots, more bloodline backstory. For survivors, surviving is a full-time job. For the eleventh film in the franchise, writers Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green (who also directs) plunged a butcher’s knife into the heart of the…

  • The Hate U Give

    October 24, 2018 - By 

    In the last few years, Fox 2000 Pictures has developed a line in sturdy, engaging, young-adult adaptations that play with teen melodrama and “issue” storytelling. And The Hate U Give is the best yet. The Fault in Our Stars was the Ur-text, then Paper Towns, last year’s underrated Love, Simon and now The Hate U Give, from Angie Thomas’ 2017 novel. The film reminded me intensely of Love, Simon, with its arc of a teenager settling into a stable identity and owning their own experiences, and its emphatic exploration of a young person struggling with how to speak their own truth.…

  • Rosie

    October 19, 2018 - By 

    Rosie’s tagline describes the film “inspired by too many true stories” of families affected by homelessness. It is an affecting and vital exploration of Ireland’s housing crisis through the concentrated study of one Dublin working class family’s experiences. Unable to find a house after their landlord decides to sell their home, Rosie (Sarah Greene, Black 47, Dublin Oldschool), her partner John Paul (Moe Dunford, Michael Inside) and their four children have been sleeping in hotel rooms unsure where they will be staying next. The children are often late for school because the family have been staying in hotels across county…

  • First Man

    October 19, 2018 - By 

    How far would you travel to get away from everyone you love? Would 400,000 kilometres be enough? Damien Chazelle is not a romantic. He is in the habit of taking conventionally uplifting genres — the artist’s journey, the technicolour musical, and now the space race — cutting out their rah-rah hearts, and rebuilding them with a controlled focus on grit, sacrifice and the weight of roads not taken. The spectacular lunar leap that took place in the summer of 1969 is hardwired to be a narrative of triumph. Triumph over gravity, over the odds, and, let’s not forget, over the Soviets, who snatched an…

  • Bad Times at the El Royale

    October 11, 2018 - By 

    Drew Goddard has an attraction to high-concept ideas. The former Lost and Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer made his feature directorial debut with 2012’s Cabin in The Woods, a slasher meta-horror about a group of teens tormented by secret scientists and their army of canonical monsters and horror tropes. Cabin’s wall-breaking endeared it to genre die-hards, but it’s hard to recall much else the movie did that was scary or interesting. This problem is present, to much greater effect, in Bad Times at the El Royale. Goddard’s second film as writer-director isn’t quite as novel as Cabin, falling more comfortably…

  • Venom

    October 11, 2018 - By 

    Isn’t the point of anti-heroes that they’re not dull? Great power, great responsibility? That’s Peter Parker’s deal. He’s gotta defeat Doc Ock in time for date night for MJ, and pick up Aunt May’s prescription on the way. But Eddie Brock gets to be a shithead. In the tradition of superhero doppelgangers, Venom gets the super-abilities without the baggage, indulging in the petty, violent delights off-bounds for your friendly neighbourhood Spidey. But in Venom, Sony Pictures’ still-can’t-believe-it’s-real foray into the fringes of their Spiderverse IP, which doesn’t mention the wise-cracking web-slinger at all, Eddie Brock gets to save the world.…

  • A Star Is Born

    October 3, 2018 - By 

    A Star Is Born is unstoppable. It’s got audience affection and Academy respectability in its sights, and it barrels straight at them. Produced, directed, written and starring Bradley Cooper, this is the Hangover star’s leap for high populist acclaim and he doesn’t take any chances, fashioning, alongside brilliant co-star Lady Gaga and mother! DP Matthew Libatique, a swelling, soapy, lens-flare multiplex ballad. While you’re busy tapping your foot, it eats your heart.  A Star Is Born’s primary achievement is how it escapes the orbit of well-thumbed, downright cliched, material through sheer performative will. Cooper is Jackson Maine, a damaged classic rock…