REVIEW: Ebenezer

Is it ethical to pay to see a Johnny Depp film?

It’s a question I found myself considering after attending a preview screening of Ebenezer, having just paid to see a Johnny Depp film. Not exactly the moral high ground.…

REVIEW: You Can See Everything

At several points in You Can See Everything, I caught myself thinking that, had this been fiction, I’d have accused the writer of laying it on a bit thick.

Reality is under no obligation to be plausible. Whether we’re any good at interpreting it is another matter.…

REVIEW: Wild Horse Nine

Wild Horse Nine is a film in which almost everyone seems to be in a foul mood, and for much of its first half, so was I.

Martin McDonagh’s latest follows two fractious CIA operatives, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), dispatched to Easter Island against the backdrop of the impending 1973 Chilean coup.…

Before my screening of The Social Reckoning, the Molly Rose Foundation ran an advertisement in which Ian Russell described Instagram’s part in his teenage daughter’s death. It may be unfair to measure a two-hour drama against thirty seconds of a bereaved father’s testimony, but for all the film’s outraged speeches, none lands quite so hard.…

REVIEW: The Death of Robin Hood

Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood is the latest attempt to reinvent England’s most enduring outlaw.

We’ve had the iconic swashbuckler, the historical epic, the gritty origin story. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Otto Bathurst’s version with Taron Egerton at least preserved the sense that beneath the grime remained a fundamentally heroic figure.…

REVIEW: The Odyssey (2026)

WARNING: Some spoilers for a 3,000-year-old epic poem

Christopher Nolan has spent much of his career telling stories about men trying to find their way home.

Cobb in Inception, Cooper in Interstellar, even Oppenheimer, in a moral rather than geographical sense, are all attempting to return to something they have lost: family, certainty, themselves.…

REVIEW: In the Hand of Dante [Netflix]

Dante begins The Divine Comedy lost in a dark wood. Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante invites us to follow him there.

Adapted from Nick Tosches’ notoriously unfilmable novel, Schnabel’s first feature since At Eternity’s Gate is part literary mystery, part gangster thriller, part historical epic, part theological meditation.…

REVIEW: The Get Out (2026)

Russell Crowe tries to leave an overcrowded party.

Formerly titled Bear Country, Derrick Borte’s The Get Out arrives with a premise that sounds deceptively simple: a nightclub owner decides he has had enough and decides to get out of the business.…

REVIEW: Blue Moon

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon opens on a note so unexpectedly forlorn that it reverberates through everything that follows.

A classic lounge number drifts over a rain-sheened alley. Into this slumps a diminutive man — hat slipping, thinning combover exposed, body folding like a cigarette collapsing in ash.…

Little Grey Celluloid: Some Thoughts on Poirot in Film (and TV)

From Albert Finney to Sir Kenneth Branagh (and, of course, David Suchet), the screen legacy of Hercule Poirot is a storied one.

Of all Christie’s detective novels, Murder on the Orient Express perhaps lends itself best to a blockbuster: it promises grand set-pieces, an opulent train cutting through rugged, snow-capped scenery, and a neatly contained roster of suspects ripe for starry casting.…