Like most prepubescent boys (and girls) in the early ‘90s, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. I can still vividly remember the first time I saw the movie – perhaps my earliest clear memory of a movie theatre – clutching my armrests in fear as an attempt to transport velociraptors went horribly wrong. By the…
Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t going to change your life. It’s probably not necessary to clarify that, but I thought it was worth noting in the wake of the torrent of #MadMadFuryRoad hype and hyperbole that has consumed Twitter regarding George Miller’s long-(long)-awaited follow-up to his original Mad Max trilogy. Believe the hype, but don’t…
Brett Morgen, the director of documentary Cobain: Montage of Heck, possesses two advantages few documentarians have. The first is that his subject – Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain – has become such a cultural icon that there’s no need for him to rehash the broad details of his life story. The second is his unprecedented…
The opening scene of the Oscar-nominated Argentinian anthology film Wild Tales – in which a pilot deliberately crashes a plane occupied with all those who wronged him – plays decidedly uncomfortably in the wake of the Germanwings plane crash. But while that scene might make audiences uncomfortably shift in their seats, that sort of discomfort…
You don’t have dig particularly deep to find similarities between Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Russian drama Leviathan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish drama Winter Sleep. They were erstwhile competitors across last year’s arthouse awards season; Ceylan took the lead early by picking up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but Leviathan was more successful in more mainstream awards…
There’s something incredibly endearing about Infinitely Polar Bear’s unostentatious simplicity. Constructed on familiar indie tropes – a hand-made, whimsical aesthetic, a period setting, a family unit defined equally by conflict and closeness – the film sidesteps cliché to conjure an utterly charming experience. Infinitely Polar Bear’s impossibly twee title is paraphrased from Faith Stuart’s (Ashley…
Inherent Vice is one of those rare examples of cinema where the experience of the audience is entirely aligned with the experience of the film’s protagonist. This achievement should celebrated when found in great horror films, that terrify and alienate you along with their characters, or classics like Goodfellas, which follows sharp-edged cocaine dynamism with…
Sion Sono throws everything he’s got at Why Don’t You Play in Hell? “Everything” includes duelling yakuza clans, a ragtag crew of wannabe filmmakers called the “Fuck Bombers”, a budding actress packing an incredibly catchy toothpaste jingle and the querulous young man who pretends to be her boyfriend. The film’s introduction is necessarily a bit…
The Martin Luther King Jr biopic Selma is primarily composed of individuals undergoing impassioned debates. We watch King (David Oyelowo) and Lyndon B Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) verbally spar over voting rights; with segregation outlawed in 1960s America, African-Americans find their legal right to vote denied, and divided camps of activists argue about the best way…
If you ask me, the modern incarnation of James Bond – as played by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and the upcoming Spectre – has been a resounding success. But while I’ve enjoyed Craig’s stint as 007, particularly Casino Royale, it’s fair to say that his Bond films have been lacking…
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