The Gentlemen (2019)
The Gentlemen sees Guy Ritchie return to home turf: posturing gangsters doing gangster shit.
Widows: The Genre Film That Isn’t
But Widows exhibits cosmetic similarities with the heist genre, it resolutely resists generic conventions.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Here, Lanthimos imagines a world where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are false signifiers concealing human selfishness.
The Beguiled (2017)
The Beguiled succeeds as an arch comedy that savagely satirises its self-obsessed ladies of leisure.
Expanding the Potterverse in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a fun-spirited, nimble adventure when it’s not committing some of the sins of universe-expanding.
The Weight of a Basketball: The Lobster and the Tyranny of Social Conformity
Successful speculative fiction is essentially sociology. It’s grounded not in the details of the alternate reality it concocts, but in investigating how societies and individuals would react to different structures and opportunities. The best speculative fiction isn’t inspired by spaceships or wizardry; rather, it’s impelled by an overriding interest in human nature – a considered,…
Miss Julie (2014)
I assume that the melodramatic machinations of Miss Julie played like gangbusters in 1890s Sweden, but a century later it all rings pretty false. Bergman acolyte Liv Ullmann sneaks in a reference to Cries and Whispers in the opening flashback and executes an excellent final shot, but otherwise can’t overcome the inherent staginess of the…
British Film Festival 2014
November last year introduced the inaugural British Film Festival, a breath of fresh air in an increasingly stale slate of nation-centric film festivals. It’s not that I don’t have a lot of respect for local festivals like the Italian, Israeli, French etc festivals – I only saw one of my favourite films of the year…
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