Tag: comedy
Thor: Ragnarok & The Snowman
Friday, October 20th, 2017 Film Reviews,At the beginning of this week I was looking forward to The Snowman, based on a gripping crime novel by Norway’s Jo Nesbø. I had fewer expectations for another Scandinavian saga – Thor:Ragnarok, the third installment of the popular Marvel superhero franchise. By the end of the week my expectations had been trashed so effectively […]
Victoria and Abdul
Friday, September 15th, 2017 Film Reviews,One marvels at the undying appeal of Queen Victoria for latter-day filmmakers. Along with two features: John Madden’s Mrs. Brown (1997) and Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria (2009), there are dozens of movies in which the Dear Old Queen makes an appearance. She’s usually portrayed as a stern but lovable grand dame who strikes an […]
Logan Lucky
Friday, August 18th, 2017 Film Reviews,Steven Soderbergh is one of Hollywood’s mavericks and one of its great professionals. A certain percentage of his films might be termed arthouse projects, while others embrace the mainstream, leaping from genre to genre with the enthusiasm of a life-long student of the cinema. It’s almost as if Soderbergh becomes wary of his own artistic […]
The Trip to Spain
Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 Film Reviews,In 2010 Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon took us on a culinary tour around the Lake District, in 2014 they ate their way through Italy. Now, reunited with director, Michael Winterbottom, they’re off to Spain. Long may their travels continue. The premise, as ever, is for these two sometime friends to visit a series of […]
Rules Don't Apply
Friday, May 5th, 2017 Film Reviews,Does anybody remember Howard Hughes? Rules Don’t Apply, Warren Beatty’s fictionalised portrait of the eccentric billionaire, was reputedly decades in gestation. In the meantime we’ve had The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s bio pic of Hughes’s early life, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning five. Thirteen years […]
A Man Called Ove
Friday, March 31st, 2017 Film Reviews,“You don’t need to put Christmas into everything,” complains Ove, whose life story has become a surprising worldwide hit. A Man Called Ove is unashamedly sentimental but this doesn’t seem to be a problem for most cinema-goers. Earlier this year, Ove earned Sweden an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Being part of […]
Toni Erdmann
Friday, February 10th, 2017 Film Reviews,Toni Erdmann is a film destined to reignite that old question about the German sense of humour: “Do they have one?” It’s a stereotype Germans themselves like to joke about, in a not-very-funny way. On the evidence of Maren Ade’s long, unorthodox film it seems German humour is alive and well, although some viewers may […]
Paterson
Friday, January 6th, 2017 Film Reviews,For most directors film is a narrative art. Those movies that abandon story-telling in favour of portentous ‘poetic’ imagery are rapidly consigned to the arthouse bin where they are admired by a handful of academics and ignored by everyone else. In Paterson, Jim Jarmusch has demonstrated that it’s possible to make a film about poetry […]
Office Christmas Party
Friday, December 16th, 2016 Film Reviews,T.J.Miller, one of the stars of Office Christmas Party, was arrested last week for slapping someone across the back of the head after an argument about Donald Trump. In the movie he presides – with apparent impunity – over an evening of massive destruction of private property and numberless offences against good taste. In a […]
La La Land
Friday, December 16th, 2016 Film Reviews,With seven nominations for this year’s Golden Globes it will be surprising if La La Land doesn’t blitz the coming awards season. 31-year-old writer-director, Damien Chazelle came to prominence with his impressive second feature, Whiplash (2014), described as a horror film about music. Now he has given us a musical that pays homage to the […]