Film Reviews
The Boys in the Boat & The Holdovers
Friday, January 12th, 2024 Film Reviews,In those heady days when John Wayne was dispatching hostile injuns by the dozen, no-one could have envisaged Hollywood making clean-cut white Americans into the bad guys. It would have taken a clairvoyant to predict the tide of identity politics that has swept over the United States in recent times, engendering a new generation of […]
Dream Scenario & Ferrari
Sunday, January 7th, 2024 Film Reviews,Another year, another burst of films released in time for the awards season. To cover the field expeditiously I’m going to look at two of them: Kristoffer Borgli’s engaging indie, Dream Scenario, and Michael Mann’s bio-pic, Ferrari, which – surprisingly enough – is also an independent production. Dream Scenario may have the smaller budget, but […]
Films of 2024
Sunday, December 31st, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s been a trend for years, but 2024 is shaping as a cinematic smörgasbord of Hollywood sequels and remakes. The industry seems to have grown so risk-averse it’s unwilling to take a chance on new stories and unfamiliar characters – which may be viewed as an incipient threat to creativity and talent, or a great […]
Poor Things
Wednesday, December 27th, 2023 Film Reviews,Imagine Frankenstein remade as a Scottish sex comedy and you’ll be slightly better prepared for Poor Things. I say “slightly” because Yorgos Lanthimos and his favourite scriptwriter, Tony McNamara, have created another bizarre, indefinable production that juggles extremes of vulgarity and profundity. Pay too much attention to the foul language and bare flesh, and you […]
Wonka
Thursday, December 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Have you ever had that feeling, a few minutes into a film, that you are not its target audience? Welcome to Wonka, a movie so sugary it should carry a health warning for diabetics. Never a scene slips by without some fulsome reference to chocolate, in an endless appeal to the viewer’s “sweet tooth”. It […]
Maestro
Friday, December 15th, 2023 Film Reviews,Perhaps the only way to portray someone as mercurial as Leonard Bernstein is in the Cubist manner. The American poet, Wallace Stevens, suggested there were thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, but with Bernstein (1918-90), that barely scrapes the surface. He was conductor, composer, pianist, writer of popular musicals, educator, and celebrity. One might […]
The Old Oak
Friday, December 8th, 2023 Film Reviews,Ken Loach, a grammar-school boy with a law degree from Oxford, has long been British cinema’s voice of the working classes. From films such as Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969), to The Old Oak, Loach has delivered a consistent brand of social realism steeped in compassion and anger. At the age of 87, the […]
Napoleon
Friday, December 1st, 2023 Film Reviews,Only Ridley Scott might have taken on a project as ambitious as Napoleon and avoided embarrassment. If he doesn’t entirely succeed this may be because the subject is simply too vast, too complex, to be crammed into two-and-a-half hours. There are thousands of books on Napoleon (1769-1821), with new ones being published every other month. […]
The Hunger Games: the Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Thursday, November 23rd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie, the fourth part of a ‘Hollywood trilogy’. Those films drew on the star power of Jennifer Lawrence as heroine, Katniss Everdeen, but the actor’s light has dimmed in recent years, the low point being the dismal sex comedy, No Hard Feelings […]
Saltburn
Saturday, November 18th, 2023 Film Reviews,Downton Abbey it ain’t. The grand estate of Saltburn may be even larger than the Crawleys’ ancestral home, but the tone is distinctly lower. In her second outing as a director, Emerald Fennell takes aim at a subject that has been shot full of holes on many occasions: the English upper classes. If Fennell’s previous […]