• The 15.17 To Paris

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    On 21 August 2015, on a cross-border train from Amsterdam to Paris, a Moroccan man named Ayoub El Khazzan emerged from a toilet cubicle shirtless, an AKM assault rifle in his hands. He shot a passenger who tried to intervene and then went to open fire on the carriage, but the weapon jammed, allowing three young American men to rush El Khazzan and prevent further violence. Afterwards Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, two of whom were off-duty members of the U.S. Armed Services, received the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration of the French Republic. Back home, Stone earned a…

  • Journey’s End

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    On the 100 year anniversary of the end of The First World War, director Saul Dibb (Suite Francaise) and writer Simon Reade (Private Peaceful) have adapted R.C. Sheriff’s 1928 play, based on his real-life experiences, to serve as a timely, gut-punch of a reminder of the horrors of this dark period in our history. And with an exceptional British cast and an absolutely astoundingly detailed production, Journey’s End is a surefire war classic. Set during the last year of the war in 1918, the story centres around British infantry unit C-company, as they make their way to the frontline trenches in…

  • Glory (Slava)

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    Glory (Slava) is a satire about the hypocrisies of power and class within contemporary Bulgarian society. Like the Russian-made watch of the title, this film has been constructed with purpose. The watch keeps time; the film tells a modern parable about a small act of thoughtlessness and its consequences. Solitary railway worker Tzanko (Stefan Denolyubov) comes across a mysterious pile of cash on train tracks. He reports his find to the authorities. Tzanko is honest but also isolated, disliked by his colleagues and shown little kindness by his peers. The Ministry of Transport’s head of public relations Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva) regards…

  • Phantom Thread

    January 24, 2018 - By 

    Phantom Thread is a ghost story dressed as a love story. It’s a beautiful, expertly cut ghoul. A glistening blood diamond. There is one literal apparition, briefly, a possible fever-induced hallucination by Reynolds Woodstock (Daniel Day-Lewis, out of retirement), a fashion designer for social royalty who speaks in a charming Herzogian murmur. He sees his dead mother at the end of his sickbed, still a little boy grieving over his precious mum, sad and wounded. The so-called House of Woodstock, the gorgeous London townhouse where he lives and works, is populated by its own cast of the barely-living. Paul Thomas…

  • 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…

  • Hostiles

    January 22, 2018 - By 

    Scott Cooper (Black Mass) is a writer/director who always delves into the gritty underbelly of the US, casting an unflinching eye over its history and social traits. With Hostiles, he moves into the Western genre, and right from the shocking opening sequence, you know you are not in for a good ole boy, John Waynesque movie. And while he does occasionally move into the realm of cliche and generic storytelling that lurks in all his movies, I can’t help but admire his take on Donald E. Stewart’s (Patriot Games) manuscript and this much-flaunted genre, as he’s taken great pains to…

  • The Final Year

    January 18, 2018 - By 

    ‘I keep saying we should get a countdown clock, with the weeks and days left’, suggests Samantha Power, the Obama administration’s representative to the United Nations, in Greg Barker’s up-close HBO documentary The Final Year. The appropriately named Power, an Irish child immigrant and former law professor bewitched by the promise of Senator Obama, is talking about instilling urgency in the President’s foreign policy team, who have twelve months left in his second term to wrap up their agendas and make them watertight for whoever comes next. The ticking clock — 10 months left, now 4, now 1 — is meant to cast their…

  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

    January 12, 2018 - By 

    The phrase ‘dark comedy’ recurs in descriptions of the filmography of Martin McDonagh, the London-born but Irish-descended playwright turned film-maker who this week received a Golden Globe for his third feature, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It’s the kind of loose, generous generic signifier that covers a multitude of structural and tonal sins. Sin is something McDonagh seems very interested in, populating his films with ugly people hopscotching across ugly situations. Redemption is a tricky prospect, both for the characters and for McDonagh himself, who lumbers Three Billboards with much the same problems that made In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths such…

  • Brad’s Status

    January 10, 2018 - By 

    ‘Everyone is just thinking about themselves; they’re wrapped up in their own stuff’, high schooler Troy Sloan tells his father, who is hunched over the edge of his hotel bed, haunted by deep, formless feelings of failure. The comment is meant to reassure Brad, who has spent their college-tour trip suffering through bouts of jealousy and insecurity, and it’s the sort of line routinely served up to sooth the self-conscious. Everyone’s caught up in their own stuff, no-one even really sees you, so stop worrying so much. But Brad’s problem is that he’s already too self-involved, Ben Stiller’s wounded, jittery eyes…

  • Sanctuary

    January 4, 2018 - By 

    Cinema has a soft spot for the disabled, or at least those with worthy and theatrically resonant types of disabilities, ones that can be overcome in three acts, and leave able-bodied audiences feeling good about abstractions like “the human spirit”. Actors are lauded as “brave” for embracing physical and verbal contortions: Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man; Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar for The Theory of Everything; and, last year, Andrew Garfield’s polio quadriplegic in Andy Serkis’ Breathe. Meanwhile, television is opening itself up to richer representations of those on the Asperger’s spectrum. But a feature film with an ensemble cast, all of…