• The Old Man & The Gun

    December 7, 2018 - By 

    If you had to be robbed by anyone, you’d want to be robbed by Robert Redford. He’d flash his holster, give you a knowing nod, and lay on that wiley Texan charm, the undiminished, easy-going confidence. You’d hand over your bank card and apologise for your shitty overdraft. “No problem,” he’d smile. Based on the real-life exploits of Forrest Tucker, a serial bank robber and prison escape artist, The Old Man & The Gun is a light-hearted, light-footed crime comedy caper about the Sundance Kid refusing to go gently into that good night. After having made his way out of…

  • Sorry To Bother You

    December 3, 2018 - By 

    Those who know Lakeith Stanfield, the reluctant hero of hip-hop artist Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You, probably do so from his scene-stealing turns in Donald Glover’s Atlanta as the bleary-eyed, conspiracy-promoting Darius, who seems to drift in and out of this dimension and the next. The show, aired on FX, is a rare one clued in to the absurdies and comic challenges of life on the lowest rung, where solid structures can melt away, like a nightclub wall that revolves when your back is turned. Sorry To Bother You, which stars Stanfield as a low-level telemarketer who shoots up…

  • Shoplifters

    November 28, 2018 - By 

    When talking about great film-making legacies, there are few people alive that can rival Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda (The Third Murder, After The Storm) for consistency, quality and diversity. With his latest, Koreeda might just have intricately pieced together his finest movie to date, which is a feat in itself, given the stunning body of work that he has already got under his belt. As with all his films, Shoplifters is a gradual, deeply emotive, wonderfully humorous and highly intelligent tale that shows a side of Japan that is rarely seen with an empathetic eye. Shoplifters tells the story of…

  • The Meeting

    November 21, 2018 - By 

    An uncommon encounter conducted in the keys of grace and dignity, Irish drama The Meeting puts the mechanics of restorative justice on screen in the year’s most extraordinary blurring of fiction and reality. While walking from the bus stop to her Dublin family home one summer night, 21 year-old Ailbhe Griffith is suddenly grabbed from behind and dragged into bushes. Her attacker, who got off the bus behind her, then subjects her to a horrific sexual assault, biting, punching, scratching and penetrating her. “Not so glamorous now”, he hisses. Two passers-by intervene and chase off the perpetrator, very likely saving…

  • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

    November 16, 2018 - By 

    Not since The Hobbit has a studio franchise spin-off so thoroughly dropped the ball. The similarities between Peter Jackson’s 9-hour pilgrimage to the Lonely Mountain and the Fantastic Beasts trilogy, two in with The Crimes of Grindelwald, are immediate and obvious. Both series take a charming little throwaway book, J. K. Rowling’s 2001 Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the real-life rendition of Hogwarts’ zoological textbook, and mount them on the rack, stretching them out until the joints give out. It’s gruesome textual torture. Close your eyes and whisper along with me: disapparate, disapparate, disapparate. Like An Unexpected Journey, Fantastic Beasts started…

  • Peterloo

    November 13, 2018 - By 

    The true story of the Peterloo Massacre is a shocking chapter in England’s history that needs to be told. In theory, writer/director Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, Mr Turner) should be the man for the job, given his track record of making classic films that delve into the everyday lives of the English working class. But while Leigh does manage to capture the look and feel of the time period in a very realistic and credible manner, the viewer may feel that he is a bit heavy-handed in getting his message across, creating a tone that off-sets the seriousness of…

  • Suspiria

    November 13, 2018 - By 

    It is with careful and skilled hands that a director approaches the remake of a film such as the genre-defining, visual masterpiece that is Dario Argento’s Suspiria. When Luca Guadagnino was announced as the director for the cult classic remake, the self-confessed Argento super fan asserted that his Suspiria would be an homage to the original rather than a direct copy. This new and original take on the 1977 Italian classic sees intertwining themes of political struggle and feminism permeating a close knit but divided witches’ coven who operate under the cover of a dance studio in post-war Germany. The film…

  • Juliet, Naked

    November 8, 2018 - By 

    Nick Hornby’s most famous surrogate remains Rob Gordon, John Cusack’s musical obsessive in High Fidelity, the patron saint of record store assholes and stalled-adolescent gatekeepers of taste. Hornby has since carved out a strong second career as a screenwriter, but the adaptations of his books continue: easygoing rom-com Juliet, Naked gives us another pop culture snob, played in a less sardonic key, but relegates him to the sideline of the central serendipitous romance. Chris O’Dowd plays Duncan, a media lecturer in a small seaside town outside London who is devoted to the work and mythos of Tucker Crowe, a Jeff Buckley-esque…

  • 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…

  • Bohemian Rhapsody

    October 26, 2018 - By 

    Queen’s music is like the air. So if you’re going to give them the biopic treatment, you need to peel back the gloss and the familiarity a little, and give us a peek at the complications, the darkness and the extravagance of an icon like Freddie Mercury. Their tracks have been drilled into the DNA of modern background noise: for Bohemian Rhapsody to feel in any way fresh, it needed risk. It has none. The product of a difficult gestation, Rhapsody arrives after cycling through leads, screenwriters and directors. Bryan Singer gets the sole director credit, but he was fired…