• The Predator

    September 14, 2018 - By 

    The main action of The Predator, the unconvincing, Shane Black-helmed attempt to return the thirty year-old franchise to box office credibility, takes place on the night of October 31st. Which seems right: the film looks like it was kitted out by raiding the nearest discount Halloween supply shop. It’s one ugly motherfucker. Probably the main problem with The Predator series is the Predator himself: the galaxy’s most cold-blooded hunter is a goofy-looking alien. The dreads; the Boba Fett getup; the Bobblehead proportions; the seafish pig snout of a face. It’s an aesthetic blot emphasized by the Alien v. Predator experiments,…

  • Crazy Rich Asians

    September 12, 2018 - By 

    Romantic comedies get a bad rep because the obstacle between the lovers is a joke. There’s a misunderstanding, a misreading of a text message, and then a sudden spiral that only a dramatic gesture in the final scene can fix. Hence the trope that almost all rom-com conflicts could be resolved with an honest conversation. But in Crazy Rich Asians, adapted from Kevin Kwan’s novel by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim’s script, the romance comes up against a legitimately formidable roadblock: the Asian mother-in-law, and the cultural baggage of a whole other world. The heart-first ethos of the genre is…

  • The Nun

    September 7, 2018 - By 

    A creaky convent horror in desperate need of absolution, The Nun is the latest in Warner Brothers’ credibility-stretching attempts to hoover up audience good will for The Conjuring.  Over two central films the franchise has become an accidental financial juggernaut for WB, its relatively straightforward scares crafted with confident professionalism by director James Wan, who has an eye for tension, and boosted by the amiable chemistry of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as betrothed Ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Conjuring 2 was especially solid, distinguished by an 1980s red brick terrace atmosphere. Its weakest moments were when it went full…

  • To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

    August 31, 2018 - By 

      There’s little in life as complicated and intense as first love. The near-universality of this experience makes it the perfect source material for film. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is the latest Netflix original film and it happens to be a cute, screwball coming of age story wrapped inside a rom-com for the digitally native teen. Based on the successful YA novel by Jenny Han, five love letters (never intended to be seen by the objects of affection) find their way out of a hatbox and into the world. When Lara Jean (Lana Condor) realizes her crushes…

  • The Eyes of Orson Welles

    August 24, 2018 - By 

    Like a giddy lover, The Eyes of Orson Welles only has eyes for Orson Welles. Mark Cousins’ latest cinematic essay is a swooning, engaged, delightful dive into Welles’ career and personal life and, in particular, his practice of looking, his visual vocabulary as expressed in mostly-lost drawings and, of course, the construction of those fabulous frames. If the film is also under-edited and at times over-earnest, then this can be forgiven. Anyone who’s ever penned a love letter knows how easily they can get away from you. The Eyes opens with a sealed box, a mystery like Rosebud, retrieved from…

  • Pull Focus: I, Dolours

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Maurice Sweeney didn’t want to make a Spotlight special, lost in the evening television schedule, he tells the audience after a screening of I, Dolours, his hybrid documentary about Dolours Price, the late Provisional IRA volunteer, bomber and hunger striker. He wanted to make a movie. Party it’s strategic: a movie gets a slot at doc festivals like Pull Focus, attracting a packed multiplex audience. Partly it’s a way to use story-telling to do justice to Price’s extraordinary story of a life as a Republican soldier. On this ambition, the often-harrowing film is half-successful. I, Dolours tells the story of the Troubles and…

  • Pull Focus: The Image You Missed

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Outlining an ethics of documentary making in The Image You Missed, the late, acclaimed film-maker Arthur MacCaig (via Ernest Larsen’s crisp, twangy voiceover) describes the subject of the lens’ gaze as one who is forced to ‘account for themselves’ — their choices and responsibilities and lived experience. Who are you? And why are you doing what you’re doing? McCauley’s son Donal Foreman, Image’s director and editor, uses his own film to turn the camera’s scrutiny back on his absent father, producing an engaging, clever consideration and critique of MacCaig’s legacy, of political docs more generally, and of the subtle differences between looking at…

  • The Meg

    August 10, 2018 - By 

    Is it possible for a film to be not bad enough? Maybe that’s the wrong way to frame it. Shoddiness comes not just in quantity but in flavour: there’s good-bad, bad-bad, no-budget-bad, cheesy-bad, doomed-from-birth-bad. Producing high-yield schlock involves a precise cocktail of badness. The problem with The Meg, which feels like the frazzled product of heatwaved heads, is in its badness ratio: not enough fun-bad, too much boring-bad. The Meg, in which Jason Statham takes on a giant shark with growling one-liners and a steady harpoon arm, goes for two genre tones, and ends up splitting the difference. One is the…

  • The Darkest Minds

    August 8, 2018 - By 

    A dwindling genre still pushed by naturally rise-averse studios, the young-adult dystopic takes the us-versus-the-world siege mentality of the average teenager and kits it out with hyperbolic, now-predictable apocalyptic flourishes. A mysterious virus; economic breakdown; savage totalitarianism; stirrings of revolution. Adapted from the first novel of Alexandra Bracken’s YA trilogy with a screenplay from Chad Hodge and direction by Kung Fu Panda’s Jennifer Yuh Nelson, The Darkest Minds pits adults against kids with a savageness that’s almost comic. Youngsters either drop dead, get hunted by psycho bounty hunters, or find themselves herded into concentration camps to scrub boots for sociopaths in balaclavas. Even…

  • Teen Titans Go! To The Movies

    August 3, 2018 - By 

    “More jokes!” After D.C. and Warner Bros’ ultra-sombre film debuts left them with box office egg on their faces, the cinematic DCU has been itching, ever gradually, closer to the light, well-received populism of the Marvel house style. Justice League’s most human moment was a Josh Whedon gag; Wonder Woman swung for idealism and fish-out-of-water larks; the trailer for James Wan’s Aquaman suggests a dopey beef-bro underwater odyssey, while Shazam!‘s leans hard on the comedy, and seems to work. The memo’s gone out: the sillier the better. By that metric, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is D.C.’s best film yet.…