• 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…

  • Night School

    September 28, 2018 - By 

    From: The Administrative Office, Movie House Academy Subject: Group Assessment Feedback Dear parents, As you are aware, your children’s class was asked to submit a group project for end of term assessment. The marks for this piece of work, entitled Night School, will help determine end of year grades. Please find feedback on this project below. Mr. and Mrs. Hart: your son, Kevin, was shown he can be an amiable, if comicly scattershot presence, especially as part of a solid double-act. But if he is to improve his work he needs firmer direction: his role here, as Teddy Walker, a high school…

  • Cold War

    September 28, 2018 - By 

    The crystalline Ida (2013), about a novitiate nun in 1960’s Poland, whose discovery of a family secret provided a window into her country’s dark heart, helped establish Pawel Pawlikowski as a critical favourite, and a film-maker adept at using classical cinematic beauty to express historical discontent. His follow-up, Cold War, dedicated to Pawlikowski’s parents, is not explicitly religious in the same way. Set in Poland, just as the World War shifts into the Cold one, the film’s first and only strikingly denominational image is the bombed-out dome roof of a church. Most of the story takes place on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in nightlife spaces of cosmopolitan…

  • Climax

    September 27, 2018 - By 

    There are not many films out there that leave you exasperated, yet exhilarated by the time the finale has played out. But then there are films by Gaspar Noé, the undisputed victor for the title of ‘l’enfant terrible’ of the filmmaking world, who has a writing and directing back catalogue that has to be approached with caution by even the hardiest of filmgoers. His latest, Climax, while not as harsh as some of his previous – for example, the notorious Irreversible’– is a film that will undoubtedly shock many. Thankfully, because there is so much to appreciate and marvel in…

  • The Predator

    September 14, 2018 - By 

    The main action of The Predator, the unconvincing, Shane Black-helmed attempt to return the thirty year-old franchise to box office credibility, takes place on the night of October 31st. Which seems right: the film looks like it was kitted out by raiding the nearest discount Halloween supply shop. It’s one ugly motherfucker. Probably the main problem with The Predator series is the Predator himself: the galaxy’s most cold-blooded hunter is a goofy-looking alien. The dreads; the Boba Fett getup; the Bobblehead proportions; the seafish pig snout of a face. It’s an aesthetic blot emphasized by the Alien v. Predator experiments,…

  • A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot

    September 12, 2018 - By 

    “It smashes the head open like a melon.” 11 year-old Kevin Barry is in his kitchen, holding a hatchet up for the camera. He turns to his makeshift armoury. Here, he demonstrates, is how you throw a saw at someone running away. Kevin Barry is the youngest child in the O’Donnell family, who live in Derry’s Creggan estate, estranged from official ‘city of culture’ pride. His older brother, Philly, is currently exiled in Belfast, on orders of the neighbourhood’s Republican paramilitary enforcers. For his apparently drug-fuelled anti-social behaviour, Philly was sentenced by a secret vigilante panel and blasted in the back…

  • Crazy Rich Asians

    September 12, 2018 - By 

    Romantic comedies get a bad rep because the obstacle between the lovers is a joke. There’s a misunderstanding, a misreading of a text message, and then a sudden spiral that only a dramatic gesture in the final scene can fix. Hence the trope that almost all rom-com conflicts could be resolved with an honest conversation. But in Crazy Rich Asians, adapted from Kevin Kwan’s novel by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim’s script, the romance comes up against a legitimately formidable roadblock: the Asian mother-in-law, and the cultural baggage of a whole other world. The heart-first ethos of the genre is…

  • The Nun

    September 7, 2018 - By 

    A creaky convent horror in desperate need of absolution, The Nun is the latest in Warner Brothers’ credibility-stretching attempts to hoover up audience good will for The Conjuring.  Over two central films the franchise has become an accidental financial juggernaut for WB, its relatively straightforward scares crafted with confident professionalism by director James Wan, who has an eye for tension, and boosted by the amiable chemistry of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as betrothed Ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Conjuring 2 was especially solid, distinguished by an 1980s red brick terrace atmosphere. Its weakest moments were when it went full…

  • To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

    August 31, 2018 - By 

      There’s little in life as complicated and intense as first love. The near-universality of this experience makes it the perfect source material for film. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is the latest Netflix original film and it happens to be a cute, screwball coming of age story wrapped inside a rom-com for the digitally native teen. Based on the successful YA novel by Jenny Han, five love letters (never intended to be seen by the objects of affection) find their way out of a hatbox and into the world. When Lara Jean (Lana Condor) realizes her crushes…