Film
Demetrios Matheou
Frozen is possibly the most beloved Disney movie since the studio rediscovered its mojo in the 1990s. While picking up a couple of Oscars and laying waste to box office records, it had young girls immersing themselves in favourite characters and performing the songs on a dime.A sequel to that 2013 film was inevitable. And so with the same production team, composers and stars, we’re returning to Arendelle and its two royal sisters – one with magical powers, the other some good old-fashioned gumption, who make a formidable team when they’re not immersed in sibling squabbles. But Read more ...
Negar Esfandiary
Permission tells the story of Afrooz, the captain of Iran's National Futsal Team, who is stopped from joining her team at the Asia Cup Final because of the last minute whim of her estranged husband. It is based on Iranian football player Niloufar Ardalan, who in 2015 missed the Iran v Japan final of the Asia Games in Malaysia when her sports journalist husband Mahdi Toutounchi, enforced the right given to him by Islamic shar'ia law to prevent her from leaving the country.This second feature from director Soheil Beiraghi, described in his own Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to a powerful cast and crisp direction from Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther), 21 Bridges drives home its story of good cops, bad cops and a Big Apple rotten to the core with bulldozing force. Centre stage is Chadwick Boseman as Andre Davis, a detective renowned for showing bad guys no mercy. His record of shooting an alarming tally of felons has earned him a grilling by Internal Affairs, but Cool Hand Andre insists every killing was justified. Like his ailing old mother tells him, “you got to look the devil in the eye.”The son of a dedicated policeman killed in the line of duty, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most enduring characters in both literature and art, and yet her part in Hamlet is limited to few lines and fewer motivations. Based on Lisa Klein's novel, the new film Ophelia challenges this interpretation. Daisy Ridley stars as the iconic maiden raising above the petty squabbles of flawed men. Director Claire McCarthy talks about bringing this new adaptation to screen.OWEN RICHARDS: How did you first become involved with Ophelia?CLAIRE MCCARTHY: The job came to me off the back of a film I made called The Turning, which has Rose Byrne in it, a wonderful Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a dogged determination to see every task through, whether he’s doing the shopping for his household or supporting a collapsing palace by its beams. When the Golem bares his teeth, he’s terrifying – though the 1920 German film’s cultural resonance is the eeriest thing about it.Written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen (who also scripted FW Murnau's Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It should come as no surprise that the writer of Side Effects and Contagion, Scott Z. Burns, is capable of directing a whip-smart drama like The Report. Known for his collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, most recently on Netflix drama The Laundromat, Burns has made a career of turning complex material into engaging viewing.Echoing All the President’s Men by way of Spotlight, The Report focuses on Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), tasked by US State Senator Dianne Feinstein with investigating the "Enhanced Interrogation Technique" employed by the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Forty years after the classic, multi-Oscar winning Kramer v Kramer comes another divorce drama involving two young Americans and a son caught in the crossfire. And this one is even better. Marriage Story is a sublime film, a heart-breaking, intimate epic. It’s written and directed by Noah Baumbach, the New Yorker whose impressive back catalogue includes The Squid and The Whale (also about divorce), Greenberg and Frances Ha. His new film leaves no stone unturned in its dissection of marital upheaval. And it features superb, deeply moving Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke stars in this awkward but sweet Yuletide romcom as Kate, a chaotic, George Michael obsessed twenty-something in London who’s lost her way following a serious illness. A failed singer, she works in an all-year Christmas shop dressed as an elf, while alienating family, friends and long-suffering boss (Michelle Yeoh) with her boorish behaviour. The clouds lift with the appearance of bicycle courier Tom (Henry Golding, of Crazy Rich Asians), who begins to soften her cynical, self-loathing shell. But is he too good to be true? Given that this is co- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
For a sports movie to work for more than just the fans, it has to have drama off the pitch, track or field, with characters to root for, personal demons, a good underdog. Based on a true story that also involves high-speed danger and tragedy, James Mangold’s Le Mans ‘66 duly obliges.Christian Bale and Matt Damon – Batman and Bourne if you will – let their hair down as two motor-racing legends, to the extent that the racing drama doubles as a buddy movie. Unlike 2013's Rush, which covered the personal rivalry between Formula One drivers James Hunt and Nikki Lauda, this film Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen are dizzying romps, whereas his earlier Journey to the Beginning of Time, made in 1955, is disarmingly straightforward – a simple tale of four boys searching for prehistoric life in order to complete a homework assignment. With a minimum of fuss, they board a no-frills wooden boat and row through a cave and down a river, heading further and further back in time. There are a few petty squabbles and a couple of minor examples of what the BBFC used to term “mild peril”. Otherwise, this is joyous, exhilarating fun. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ian McKellen, his Mr Holmes director Bill Condon and Helen Mirren play clever, nasty games with conman clichés and presumptions about the elderly in this sometimes absurdly twisty thriller.McKellen’s Roy Courtnay is an irascible, whiskery cad, Mirren’s Betty McLeish the trusting, rich widow he entraps. His slow courting of her in her genteel, suburban estate home is only part of a wide portfolio of dishonesty, aided by his avuncular partner in crime Vincent (Jim Carter), a fake lawyer ever ready with dummy investment papers, whether enticing a widow over cream teas, or luring a businessman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Roland Emmerich has been trying to make this movie since the 1990s, and battled hard to raise its $100m budget from individual investors. But why? The result is an old-fashioned war film in praise of the heroic American servicemen who defeated the Japanese fleet in the battle of Midway in 1942, which turned the tide of Japan’s imperialist expansion in the Pacific, but while it sticks diligently to the historical facts, it feels bizarrely out of time and out of place. It doesn’t reinvent the war movie, as Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan or Christopher Nolan did with Dunkirk, Read more ...