• BFF17: Catfight

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Rage, maternal loss and the sting of humiliation are accelerants in the bloodstream in Catfight, Onur Tukel’s face-thumping black comedy and satire on the unreality of violence. The match is lit when estranged college chums Veronica (Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche) bump into eachother at a fancy Manhattan party for the first time in years. In this alternate America (very near future?), the country is eyeing up another war in the Middle East, and Veronica and her husband, who runs a debris clean-up company, are in for a big payday if they land a juicy Pentagon contact.…

  • Elle

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    It’s not very often that a film has me strangely anticipating which social taboo is going to be launched out of the window with amazing indifference next. Yet Elle manages to achieve this with an astoundingly entertaining edge that verges on the absurd when it’s not shocking you with its core theme of sexual assault. But all of this is unsurprising when you know that Elle is made by notorious Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop), who is at his controversial and stylistically provocative best, and stars the great Isabelle Huppert, a fearless, steely and ridiculously talented actress at the top…

  • CHiPs

    March 27, 2017 - By 

    Based on the 1977-1983 television series of the same name, CHiPs is an action-comedy remake strangely obsessed with the question of what can and cannot be considered homophobic. Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello (Michael Peña) is an FBI agent who goes undercover in the California Highway Patrol to uncover some dirty cops. On the morning of his first day, changing in the locker room, he bristles when his new partner Jon Baker (Dax Shepard), clad only in tightie whities, reaches for a hug. Ponch quickly explains he’s not homophobic or anything, it’s just a weird thing to do with a stranger. Cut to…

  • Beauty and the Beast

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the reasons fairy tales work is that they are so obviously not real. Their fantastical, exaggerated qualities help make the horror, weirdness and romantic impossibilities easier to process. And while it wasn’t exactly frightening, Disney’s iconic animated musical Beauty and the Beast, part of the late-80s/early 90s “Disney Renaissance”, had an understanding of how to build Gothic contrast, moreso than even the 18th-century French original, in which the Beast is not Beauty’s jailor but her doting servant. There was a strangeness to Beauty and the Beast‘s obviously warped story; not just the Stockholm Syndrome infatuation, or the intense…

  • Logan

    March 9, 2017 - By 

    Finally! Writer/director James Mangold (Walk The Line) has made up for the damp squib that was 2013’s The Wolverine, with a fantastic final outing for Hugh Jackman that transcends the usual superhero formula and delves into a much darker, violent and more vulnerable, nearly dystopian world. Unlike the many other movies of this genre, Logan gives the viewer a feeling of realism, substance and heart, of the type that has never been seen in the rest of the Marvel or DC worlds, making for an instant classic. In the year 2029, mutants are all but a thing of the past,…

  • George Best: All By Himself

    March 9, 2017 - By 

    George Best: All By Himself begins in darkness, with the voices of commentators eulogising George Best’s remarkable footballing talent, before the dreamlike moment is shattered by a recollection of Best’s ex-wife Angie of seeing a homeless man walking along the road, only to realise it was George. In Daniel Gordon’s documentary, football is secondary to the tragedy of Best’s personal demons, as Gordon attempts to unravel the enigma and get to the root cause of the star’s dramatic decline into alcoholism. Gordon’s film unfolds in a largely chronological structure, taking the audience from Best’s humble beginnings, through his meteoric rise…

  • 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…

  • Manchester By The Sea

    January 17, 2017 - By 

    Kenneth Lonergan makes films about the things that don’t go away. In 2000’s You Can Count On Me, the sudden orphaning of young siblings helps fashion an unsolvable divide between the two in adult life, while in Margaret, which lingered undistributed for years while director and studio fought over the final cut, witnessing a fatal accident sends Anna Paquin’s carefree teenage life spiralling in new, frustrating directions. His third feature as writer-director, Manchester by the Sea, part of Amazon Studios’ effort to chase indie respectability, is Lonergan’s most refined work yet, a restrained but movingly complex portrait of tragedy’s never-ending…

  • Live By Night

    January 15, 2017 - By 

    Ben Affleck wants you to take him seriously. He’s sorry about the whole Gigli thing. He’s sorry about Daredevil. He’s done his penance and channelled his humiliation into a professional second act, growing a prestige beard and directing safe but highly competent book treatments. They even gave him an Oscar for one of them! When a film journo presented him with Batman v Superman‘s damning reviews and the internet glimpsed the emptiness behind the eyes, the implicit logic was that he was supposed to be above this shit. But even reliably workmanlike directors can make mistakes. Dennis Lehane’s writing has provided several film-makers…