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I could hear the fanboys (and some girls) wailing from across the globe as I left the cinema. Absolute garbage! The worst Star Wars movie ever! Such a joke! I quite liked it and perhaps for all the reasons they didn’t. Continue reading
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Better than Pitch Perfect 2, not as great as the original. That’s pretty much all you need to know. Continue reading
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There’s lots to love about this film from Martin McDonagh, primarily the remarkable performance of Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes. Mildred’s daughter was murdered ten months before and, frustrated at the police’s inability to find the perpetrator, she uses three billboards on a quiet road to stir up action. Continue reading
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Based on the graphic novel ‘The Coldest City’, this Cold War action thriller is engaging and entertaining and only occasionally lacks pace and plausibility. Charlize Theron is Lorraine Broughton, the atomic blonde of the title with a shock of white hair and the epitome of sangfroid. She’s an MI6 agent and is sent to Berlin to investigate the assassination of fellow agent and former lover James Gascoigne (Sam Hargrave). Continue reading
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I’ll go out on a limb and say the best way to make a film about women is to have one direct it. The fact that the title and trailer of this film focused on William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman and co-inventor of the lie detector, led me to suspect that this might be another hagiography of a bloke who supported women’s rights. Happily it is definitely not. It is a sexy tale that places the women firmly in the centre and has given me a new appreciation of Wonder Woman. Continue reading
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Can Taika Waititi please direct every Marvel/DC film? Then I might be tempted to watch them. Not my favourite genre, New Zealand director Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, What We Do in the Shadows, Boy) for the most part refuses to take his job too seriously and peppers the script with largely improvised and genuinely funny dialogue. Continue reading
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The way to make a sequel, and big budget movie, is to give the directing job to a non-American it seems. French-Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, who directed the superb Arrival and Incendies, takes a fair stab at this one and manages to equal the original in mood, visual impact, leisurely pace and partially clothed women. Continue reading
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There’s something lovely about this dark comedy, although it’s almost unbearable sometimes to watch the sad and dangerous trajectory of hapless Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza). Continue reading
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This tense and dirty crime drama by the Safdie brothers hooked me in with its relentless pace, fluoro grubbiness and the first frame of an unrecognisable and mesmerising Robert Pattinson. Continue reading
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This unusually constructed documentary is an illustrated recitation of the words of James Baldwin, American writer and social critic. It begins with a letter to his agent about an idea to write the stories of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, all men who are outspoken about civil rights and all assassinated in the 60s. Continue reading
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