Most of us take sex for granted but, as demonstrated by Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), if you’ve never had sex it can seem like the biggest deal in the world, the pressure and expectation bearing down on you the older you get without having a sexual experience. Sex becomes an unattainable Read More
It’s an odd thing watching a film when you know how it ends. Rather than needing to focus on predicting (or anticipating) the outcome one focuses instead on the journey, picking up details along the way. We know how the subject matter of Lincoln will resolve itself: most viewers will be familiar with the passing Read More
Roger Michell’s Hyde Park on Hudson centres on a weekend in 1939 when King George VI and the Queen travelled to America (the first trip made by British monarchs to the U.S.) to visit President Franklin D. Roosevelt, residing at his mother’s upstate New York home. Against this background, the developing intimate relationship between Roosevelt Read More
Making a biopic about one of the film world’s most well-known and loved directors must be a daunting task. Director Sacha Gervasi should therefore be praised for taking on the story of Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Alma’s (Helen Mirren) turbulent relationship during the filming of Psycho (1960). The making of Hitchcock’s most Read More
Quentin Tarantino is always a difficult filmmaker to critique. Since Kill Bill (2003), he has specialised in making a very distinctive brand of reference-filled, “Grindhouse” style, ultra-violent action films. Looking back on his early films, however, they seem in retrospect to be a bit more mature and thoughtful in comparison to his recent films. The Read More
Salman Rushdie is a prolific, accomplished and influential writer. Midnight’s Children won Rushdie the 1981 Booker Prize and was also voted the Best of the Bookers in 1993 and 2008 as part of the best of 40 and 75 years of the Booker Award respectively. Rushdie collaborated with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children for Read More
A “true story”. Signalling their poignancy, these two words linger on the screen after the rest of the opening blurb has faded. The Impossible is a curious popular cinematic trompe-l’oeil, designed to capture the tragedy of the real event, but necessarily predicated on knowledge of the real-life disaster in order to create the very cinematic Read More
After the fairly tepid responses to his work between Festen (1998) and Submarino (2010, Thomas Vinterberg returns to his thematic roots in The Hunt, once again examining the idea of child abuse in a close-knit social sphere. Ex-teacher Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is working in a nursery whilst negotiating custody of his teenage son Markus (Losse Read More
Following the success of his first full length feature, 2008’s In Bruges, playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh returns with Seven Psychopaths, a fiercely droll and self-referential comedy centred around alcoholic Marty’s (Colin Farrell) futile attempts to write a screenplay, for which he has little more than “a great title” – The Seven Psychopaths. Marty’s wish is to Read More
With violence, romance, awkwardness and black humour aplenty, Ben Wheatley’s latest film appears almost elegiac in its portrayal of a Britain now overrun with upper-middle class snobbery, desperately depressing heritage locations and wearers of sensible shoes. The movie is essentially a road movie but one which takes an agonising turn for the worse even before Read More