Stars: Johannes Kuhnke, Charlotte Salt, James McArdle, Elliott Levey | Written and Directed by Ben Parker When submarine pilot Mats (Johannes Kuhnke) is approached by a low-rent Donald Pleasence to take a three-man Special Ops team deep into contested waters near the 38th Parallel, he’s understandably sceptical. Leading the mysterious trio is “Red” Edwards (Charlotte Salt), […]
Stars: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula | Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan M. Night Shyamalan was once the devil prince of the movie twist, mischievously upending audiences’ expectations with increasingly contrived plot devices which retroactively flooded his films with new meaning. Breaking point arrived with The Village […]
Stars: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Tilda Swinton, Ben Kingsley, Anthony Hayes, Keith Stanfield, Anthony Michael Hall, Topher Grace, Meg Tilly | Written and Directed by David Michôd The year is 2010. General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt) is tasked by a committee of civilian leaders with fixing the mess in Afghanistan. What this actually entails is open to […]
Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Priyanka Chopra, Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, Alexandra Daddario, Jon Bass, Rob Huebel | Written by Damian Shannon, Mark Swift | Directed by Seth Gordon It’s hard to believe this is the same guy who made King of Kong – although entirely believable that it comes from the director of Horrible Bosses […]
Stars: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller | Written and Directed by David Lynch Re-released to coincide with the new Twin Peaks series, it’s apt that Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a TV pilot. Perhaps it’s for the best it ended up in (relatively) short form. The film, weighing in at 2.5 […]
Stars: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Jack Warden | Written by Reginald Rose | Directed by Sidney Lumet It’s the hottest day of the year and a dozen men – not universally perturbed at this point – are put in a room and asked to consider the guilt […]
Stars: Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Djimon Hounsou | Written by Guy Ritchie, Joby Harold, Lionel Wigram | Directed by Guy Ritchie After a string of disappointments in the early 21st century, Guy Ritchie redeemed his box office credentials by reimagining Sherlock Holmes as a superheroic, super-stylish buddy cop franchise. Since that IP has established […]
Stars: Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Guy Pearce | Written by John Logan, Dante Harper | Directed by Ridley Scott After 2012’s Prometheus, Ridley Scott returns to the scene of the Alien prequel crime, and he’s on viscera clean-up detail: Covenant is another lead-into the 1979 classic, but it presses the reset […]
Stars: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne | Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris | Directed by George Miller A colourless rendition of George Miller’s action symphony was rumoured back in 2015, but it wasn’t until the end of last year that it would become a reality. Now released in cinemas […]
Stars: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe, Rikiya Yasuoka | Written and Directed by Juzo Itami The life and death of actor and director Juzo Itami is an incredible story in itself (he was allegedly killed by the Yakuza following his gangster movie Minbo), but he was no slouch in putting bizarre stories on the […]
Stars: Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiaki Onoe, Benkei Shiganoya, Tsukie Matsuura | Written by Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda | Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi The overarching Buddhist message of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 epic should provide a clue as to the sheer depth of misery our eponymous heroine must endure in her lifetime. Death, and another chance in the […]
Stars: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Jüri Järvet | Written by Andrei Tarkovsky; Fridrikh Gorenshtein | Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky It’s Will Self’s favourite movie, it spawned a good remake which barely nudged the box office, and it has been described as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It combines the laid-back, character-based […]
Stars: Riz Ahmed, Billie Piper, James Floyd, Roshan Seth, Cush Jumbo | Written by Patrick Neate | Directed by Pete Travis I could watch Riz Ahmed in almost anything, but there are limits, tested here by this deeply mediocre British mystery thriller. Adapted by Patrick Neate from his 2005 novel, City of Tiny Lights is helmed by […]
Stars: Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Olwen Kelly, Ophelia Lovibond | Written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing | Directed by Andre Ovredal Grantham, Virginia. A house-full of grisly murders. The body of an unidentified female is found half-buried in the basement. Down the road is the Tilden Mortuary and Crematorium, a family business that has been […]
Stars: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jared Sanford | Written and Directed by Anna Biller If Viva was Anna Biller’s ode to 1970s sexploitation films, The Love Witch is the auteur’s loving – and really quite lovely – homage to the 1960s horror heyday of Hammer Films and Roger Corman. Funny, seductive, and in the […]
Stars: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Akihiro Tomikawa, Yunosuke Ito, Go Kato | Written by Kazuo Koike, Tsutomu Nakamura | Directed by Kenji Misumi, Buichi Saito, Yoshiyuki Kuroda Producing six films across two years (1972-1974) is no mean feat, especially when you consider that they mostly retain their quality throughout. Based on the 28-volume manga series by Kazuo […]
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Michael Smiley, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor | Written by Ben Wheatley, Amy Jump | Directed by Ben Wheatley From A Field in England to a High-Rise in London to a warehouse in a US dockland, you cannot say writer-director Ben Wheatley is predictable. Except Free Fire […]
Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lakeith Stanfield, Stephen Root | Written and Directed by Jordan Peele Blumhouse Productions is on something of a commercial and critical winning streak at the moment. Aside from providing a platform for Joel Edgerton’s excellent The Gift, it is […]
There are many questions I was expecting to ask of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. How have Nintendo expanded beyond the increasingly regimented boundaries of their second flagship franchise? How will our hero, Link, fit into a world of Witchers and Far Cries, which have perfected their open worlds over the past […]
Stars: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole | Written and Directed by John Waters It may not be immediately apparent how this – his second feature, a meandering, 16mm extravaganza of micro-budget bad taste made in 1969 – could be John Waters’ highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes. But in a way it makes sense: […]
Stars: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Celia Imrie, Ivo Nandi, Adrian Schiller, Harry Groener | Written by Justin Haythe | Directed by Gore Verbinski Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is a cocky young executive working for a New York financial services firm. The board summons him and explains that there are unsavoury business shenanigans afoot. The source […]