• The Kid Who Would Be King

    February 15, 2019 - By 

    The Kid Who Would Be King is an old-fashioned film, and I don’t think Joe Cornish would mind it being called that. After some years spent contributing to studio scripts, the English writer-director follows up 2011’s Attack The Block with another tale of hearty contemporary misfits banding together to take on a deadly genre threat. The film is fuelled by issues of story-telling inheritance, drawing on Arthurian, fairy tale structures for a funny, down to Earth, quite moving tale of a young boy trying to figure out who he is. Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) is a twelve year-old struggling with a…

  • Velvet Buzzsaw

    February 11, 2019 - By 

    What’s the point of art if nobody sees it? This is one of the questions posed by a character in Velvet Buzzsaw, a satire released last weekend on Netflix that wants to sink its teeth into the contemporary art world but fails to leave a lasting impression. The discovery of a series of revolutionary paintings by an unknown and reclusive artist sets off a feeding frenzy among the galleries, museums and art buyers based in Los Angeles. This space is dominated by critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man who views everything through the lens of critique but is struggling…

  • Burning

    February 6, 2019 - By 

    True complexity and originality in film is something that is hard to come by these days. Managing to make a film that is entertaining at the same time is something that few achieve but South Korean writer-director Chang-Dong Lee (Secret Sunshine) has made a career out of it, though this is his first film since 2011’s fantastic Poetry. His latest, Burning, based on a short story called Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami — though I suspect William Faulkner’s novella of the same name is something to do with it as well — follows Jong-su, a part-time delivery man, and kicks…

  • Polar

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    The world’s greatest assassin is about to retire when his former boss decides he’s a liability. Hoping for a silly shoot ‘em up like The Mechanic or John Wick? Sorry to disappoint but Polar, released this week by Netflix, isn’t it. Instead, this is a film so terrible that it’s an early contender for the year-end worst of lists. Duncan Vizla (Mads Mikkelsen) is the great assassin preparing for his 50th birthday and mandatory retirement. He’s already started to wind down by moving to a snow covered one-street town in Montana. There, Duncan wanders around his log cabin, buys a…

  • Destroyer

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    In Destroyer, Nicole Kidman is cast against type as Erin Bell, a Los Angeles homicide detective haunted by her past. It’s a startling performance from Kidman and one that could have put her in the running to feature in the best actress category at this year’s Academy Awards. We can wonder about the reasons for the omission another time. Destroyer is a middling thriller that benefits enormously from the work of its outstanding lead. When a body is discovered on the streets of LA, Erin Bell comes to believe that the murder is connected to a botched undercover operation she…

  • The Mule

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In Clint Eastwood’s The Mule, The Man with No Name is faced with his biggest adversaries yet: Cartels, the DEA, and smartphones. A quite strange and mostly not very good version of what David Lowery and Robert Redford were doing in The Old Man And The Gun, Eastwood directs and stars as a 90 year-old horticulturist who has fallen on hard times and becomes a drugs mule for the local Cartel. Like Redford’s career criminal in Old Man, Mule is a possible swansong in which a screen icon plays a compulsive workaholic who has neglected his family. But Mule has a sourer…

  • Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

    January 21, 2019 - By 

    The word “hustle” used to denote a ruse or con game, a trick to fleece someone out of their cash. In the current parlance of hyper-go morning-routine capitalists, it’s taken on a new aspirational aura, now the religion of twenty three year-old dudes with Tim Ferris quotes in their bio. Following close on the heels of Hulu’s doppelganger doc Fyre Fraud, unavailable outside the U.S., Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened makes clear that, in many ways, the meaning of the word hasn’t shifted at all. Directed by Chris Smith (Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, another doc about…

  • The Upside

    January 16, 2019 - By 

    Phillip Lacasse doesn’t want to be patronised. Played by Bryan Cranston, the disabled billionaire, rendered paralysed from the neck down by a paragliding accident, doesn’t want people making a fuss over him, speaking over him or adopting that pitying tone you would take with a shy child. He hires unemployed ex-con Dell (Kevin Hart, making the radical leap from bad comedy to bad comic drama) as his live-in life auxiliary precisely because he doesn’t tiptoe around his condition. How unfortunate, then, that he finds himself in a film that is so consistently patronising: to him, to his new buddy, and,…

  • The Camino Voyage

    January 14, 2019 - By 

    Four Irishmen in a boat. It sounds like the start of a joke. The Camino Voyage, directed by Irish documentarian Donal O’Ceilleachair, chronicles the attempt of four Kerry men — and later, adding a dash of name-recognition, The Frames frontman Glen Hansard — to travel the traditional route of the Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of Saint James, an ancient pilgrimage from Ireland to a Galician cathedral in northern Spain. With an appreciation for symmetry, the group — two writers, an artist and a stonemason — set off from St. James’ Gate in Dublin, on a passageway across the Irish Sea, the Atlantic’s edge, and…

  • 2018 in Film: 35 Highlights of The Year

    December 21, 2018 - By 

    To mark the end of 2018, we’ve sent our film writers rummaging through their scrapbooks for the year’s highlights. Here are the moments, scenes, performances and film-making achievements that we just couldn’t shake. 1. The ballroom scene in The Square In The Square, Ruben Östlund sets about unpicking the false civility of the modern urban beta male (Cales Bang’s museum director) with slow precision. But then, about two-thirds of the way through, he sets off a firework, in which a hulking performance artist (Terry Notary) goes full simian during a high society dinner, baboon screeches, smashing crockery and eventually grabbing a woman…