• 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…

  • The Commuter

    January 23, 2018 - By 

    Liam Neeson’s late-career rejuvenation as your taxi driver’s favourite action hero has largely been down to three European film-makers. French pair Luc Besson and Olivier Megaton wrote and directed the vengeful paterfamilias fantasies of the Taken series, while Spain’s Jaume Collet-Serra has directed Neeson in a series of highish-concept movies with interchangably forgettable titles: Run All Night (ticking-clock cops), Unknown (amnesia) and Non-Stop (murder at 16,000 feet). The latter’s locked-box story of an Air Marshall sniffing out a killer above the Atlantic provides a pretty obvious blueprint for the train-tracks mystery of Collet-Serra’s latest, The Commuter, in which Neeson plays…

  • Silence

    January 14, 2017 - By 

    Martin Scorsese has to be commended for taking on the adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 book of the same name, as Silence requires a deep understanding of Japan, its history and its people. And while what he achieves is impressive with the overall outlook and feel of the film, I have to admit that I felt there was problems with the representation of the Japanese Christians for the first half, along with some of the more grim scenes of violence and torture later on. If you are familiar with some of the many classic Japanese films of this era like Rashomon…