Locke shows that all you need for a great film is an engine

 

The shadowy interior of a BMW, the sallow yellow glare of a streetlamp; road markings, overpasses. “You have a call waiting”.

As premises go, Locke’s is rivetingly simple: Ivan Locke, a foreman on a construction site, has had to make a last-minute trip from Birmingham down to London.…

X-Men: Days Of Future Past is like a dog chasing its tail – fun but circuitous

 

It’s been fourteen years since the X-Men franchise first graced our cinema screens.

That’s roughly the length of time it took Star Trek to go from The Motion Picture to Generations, the film when we finally bade farewell to William Shatner’s Captain James T.…

Godzilla (2014) is like a storm on the horizon

 

How many films is it possible to make about a giant rampaging lizard?

An idea may be all in the execution – after all, how many films can you make about a Walther-packing, martini-swilling super-spy? – but the need to have buildings crumble and people scream surely serves as something of a limiting factor.…

Two Faces of January is a multi-faceted Highsmith thriller

 

As film directors go, it’s hard to escape the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock.

The iconically portly Brit directed more than 50 films during his lifetime with an impressive batting average in terms of outright classics: Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest.…

Let’s be Frank: this indie dramedy has an identity crisis

 

It’s a bit of a contradiction when you walk into a film with no idea of what to expect and walk out somehow disappointed.

This is certainly true in the case of Frank, a quirky little indie dramedy from director Lenny Abrahamson.…

Blue Ruin’s cautionary tale is Death Wish meets the Hatfield-McCoys

 

Real life isn’t like the movies.

True love is not the inevitable outcome of a tempestuous first meeting and cars don’t blow up just because you put a few bullets in them. It’s this reality that is at the heart of Blue Ruin.…

Brick Mansions is not quite solid cinema

 

It’s a sad fact of life that actors die during filming.

Not only is their passing tragic at whatever age, it has the added effect of leaving their final work unfinished. There are, of course, ways around this.

When screen veteran Oliver Reed died before shooting all his scenes for Gladiator, the filmmakers used a body double and CGI to depict the altered fate of his character, Proximo.…