Timothy Spall in Mr Turner (2014)

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…

Mama (2013)

Mama has gotten more press than your average horror film, thanks more to its cast than anything else. The film, directed by Argentinean Andrés Muschietti and “presented by” Guillermo del Toro, concerns two young girls found in the woods five years after their disappearance and their foster parents, Kingslayer (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Bin-Laden-slayer (Jessica Chastain).…

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

If you watched the trailer above for Zero Dark Thirty, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a cinematic Call of Duty, a jingoistic portrayal of the war on terrorism, an action film where Bert Macklin, Drazic and Joel Edgerton kill Osama Bin Laden. Certainly, the last hour of the film is a tense, cavernous…