Hail, Caesar!
Swords and Scandals
The Coen brothers have always delighted in playing with the conventions of cinema. Their tale of small-town cops bamboozled by brutal…
The Coen brothers have always delighted in playing with the conventions of cinema. Their tale of small-town cops bamboozled by brutal…
Three years after presidential bodyguard Mike Banning single-handedly saved the White House from a gargantuan terror blitz…
When Marty Baron took over as editor of The Boston Globe in 2001, he decided to turn his attention to a story that the paper had previously…
Against a sky of deep crystal blue, in the remote and heady peaks of the Swiss Alps, Michael Caine conducts a symphony of cattle, their…
‘Visceral’ will be a popular adjective in reviews of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest. It pretty much resets the dial on the description…
Part way through Tarantino’s eighth picture, Samuel L. Jackson orders his ragtag compadres: “Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it waaay down.” Is…
At a time when trailers spill an ever-increasing amount of spoilers in a competitive bid to draw audiences, Joy’s is refreshingly economic…
And so, the time is finally upon us. Time to open what feels like the most widely anticipated Christmas present of all time. Expectation simply…
Any film would be proud to claim the singular involvement of Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks or Mark Rylance. To be able to boast all three…
Perhaps the single most influential person on our current digital age, a cinematic treatment of Steve Jobs’ life was sure to follow his early…
Nine years on, it’s possible to forget the magnitude of the shift in tone achieved by Daniel Craig’s first Bond outing, Casino Royale (2006)…
From the moment Colin Farrell checks in, informing the hotel receptionist that the sheepdog at his side is “my brother …he didn’t make it”, we…
Ridley Scott follows up the muted reaction to his biblical Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) and the never-going-to-live-up-to-the-hype Alien prequel…
Kate and Geoff are the archetypal stable couple: middle-aged, long married, steadfastly loyal. On the verge of celebrating their forty-fifth…
You have to wonder if the title of this touching one-off entry into the great detective’s filmed canon is an implicit attempt to redress some sort of…
Having swerved to avoid the eighties dustbowl antics of an unhinged Mel Gibson, I state on the starting grid that I have never seen Mad Max…
The central casting of Michael Keaton in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman is an inspired choice. Immediately it hints at a playful…
At the heart of Ava DuVernay’s stirring Martin Luther King biopic is a central performance that has unsurprisingly dominated the critical…
The key characteristic of a Christopher Nolan film is an atmosphere of gaining momentum. From simple foundations events steadily unfold…
Bill Murray, venerated head grouch of Hollywood, finds himself in that rarefied league of the acting establishment in his later years. He can…
Jack O’Connell is often referred to as ‘rising star’ of the Brit acting school. He certainly shone in the efficiently menacing Eden Lake (2008)…
The imposing figure of John Ruskin towers over the Victorian era. Primary art critic, prominent thinker and prolific writer, even artist in his own…
Few toys attain such longevity that they feel fundamental to the very notion of childhood. Lego may even be alone in acquiring such iconic…
I, Frankenstein has a brazen goal. To stop pedants everywhere correcting others when they label the creature in Mary Shelley’s seminal gothic fiction…
Nick Murphy’s gloomy tale of police driven to desperate measures, in the wake of a local child murder, features a British acting quartet of the…
Ryan Gosling’s motorbike stunt rider Luke in The Place Beyond The Pines may bear echoes of his near silent getaway specialist in Drive…
The Gatekeepers in question are the men who have headed up the ‘Shin Bet’. It’s an organisation you’ve probably not heard of, but as their job…
Reminiscent of the type of cinematic coincidence that arguably tainted the release of both Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006) a few years back…
This Is 40 is billed as a “sort-of” sequel to Judd Apatow’s earlier Knocked Up (2007). With no characters in common with his formative smash hit…
The tsunami that blighted Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India on boxing day of 2004 is a natural disaster on a virtually inconceivable…
Sci-fi plots based on paradoxes are often an enjoyable trip while it lasts but, once the run-time is over, and with the consideration afforded by…