Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…
Spy thrillers are generally sleek and seductive. They have the cold gleam of gunmetal with the occasional sparkle of a diamond-studded Rolex. The spy thriller is a debonair gentleman clad in the perfect black tuxedo. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a different kind of spy movie altogether. Instead of a tuxedo, think an aged duffel…
It goes without saying that Labyrinth is a thoroughly strange kids’ film. For better or worse, they don’t make them like this anymore. It’s hard to imagine any decade but the cocaine-addled ‘80s producing an apparently commercial children’s movie populated by grotesque puppets about which a sinisterly sexual David Bowie cavorts, with only the barest…
It’s hard to talk about A Hijacking without comparing it to Captain Phillips so, fuck it, here we go. The two cover similar content, both narratively – focusing on commercial ships hijacked by pirates – and thematically, with each film drawing implicit links between their events and the damage wrought by modern commercialism/capitalism. Where Captain…
Chef is clearly a personal film for Jon Favreau. This film of food trucks, caviar eggs and molten fillings is as much a tale of artistic resilience as it is the beauty of cooking. It stars Favreau (writer and director besides) as celebrity chef Carl Casper. We watch as he crafts the perfect toasted sandwich,…
How I Live Now is a good movie whose potential greatness is squandered by a staggeringly wrong-headed romantic plotline. The set-up of the film is engaging – sixteen year-old American teenager Daisy (Saoirse Roman) moves to England to stay with her cousins just as the country is embroiled in a devastating nuclear war, the details…
In my interview with 52 Tuesdays director Sophie Hyde, she described her first feature length drama as “a very flawed film.” I don’t disagree. But this is a film whose flaws aren’t failings; rather evidence of an exciting, refreshingly different movie. Flaws are to be expected with such an unconventional approach to filming: per the…
About a week ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sophie Hyde, the award-winning director of 52 Tuesdays. The film and the director are both remarkable – having had only a very busy work day to prepare for the interview, I went in with a list of half-written, largely-incoherent questions that she answered with aplomb,…
Bad Neighbours (titled just Neighbors in the States) is a mash-up of two “classic” – or, if you’re feeling less generous, clichéd – comedy conceits. The film modifies the ‘slobs vs snobs’ frathouse formula by repurposing the ‘snobs’ as 30-something stoners struggling with the demands of adulthood. There’s little originality in the Bad Neighbours screenplay, but thankfully…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 seems like it could be the first feature film to take inspiration from AAA videogame development. That isn’t a good thing. You see, many weaker big-budget videogames suffer from creative inconsistency born of farming out their writing to dozens of writers; this guy wrote the lore, that guy writes the journal…
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