REVIEW: The Power of the Dog (London Film Festival 2021)

Jane Campion return to filmmaking after a twelve-year hiatus with a composed yet striking rumination on masculinity and repression.

The second Netflix western of the festival, The Power of the Dog starts as a tale of two brothers – the plump, well-scrubbed George (Jesse Plemons, an undemonstrative Newfoundland dog) and the lean, raw-boned Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch, a sharp-eyed Border Collie) – who run a large ranch in Montana circa 1925.…

REVIEW: Last Night in Soho (London Film Festival 2021)

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is both a love letter to the allure of the Swinging Sixties and a cautionary tale about the corruption beneath.

When Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to London to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer, she’s unprepared for life in student accommodation.…

REVIEW: Spencer (London Film Festival 2021)

In his latest film, Pablo Larraín continues to play out our fascination with private lives and public personas.

Spencer gives us a woman on the verge of a breakdown during one final, terrible Christmas with her forbidding in-laws. It just so happens that the woman is Diana, Princess of Wales, and the in-laws are the British Royal Family.…

REVIEW: The Harder They Fall (London Film Festival 2021)

The opening gala of this year’s London Film Festival, The Harder They Fall is a classic Spaghetti Western with a few incendiary extra ingredients: all-star cast, stylised violence, pounding bass.

The feature debut of writer-director Jeymes Samuel, the film recasts historical figures from the Old West as combatants in a bloody, stylised tale of revenge.…

PODCAST: No Time to Die [Movie RobCast]

Episode 127 of The Movie Robcast is a license to thrill affair.

With No Time to Die finally released in cinemas, Robs Daniel & Wallis can let loose their opinions of Daniel Craig’s final 007 outing.

Unsurprisingly, they have plenty to talk about.…

PODCAST: London Film Festival 2021 Preview [Movie RobCast]

Episode 126 of The Movie Robcast previews this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Back in cinemas after a largely digital outing in 2020 for obvious reasons, the festival this year offers its typically vast range of movies (and TV series) from around the globe.…

PODCAST: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings [Movie RobCast]

Episode 125 of The Movie Robcast takes a one-inch punch at Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings.

How does Marvel’s first Asian focussed feature hold up? How does this twenty-fifth film in the MCU pave the way for what comes next?…

PODCAST: FrightFest 2021 [Movie RobCast]

Episode 124 of The Movie Robcast delves deep into the dark heart of FrightFest 2021.

The UK’s biggest horror film festival was back in the cinema this August Bank Holiday weekend, with a gorenucopia of sinister cinematic treats to entertain fans.…

REVIEW: The Toll

Described by director Ryan Andrew Hooper as a “West Walian Western”, The Toll is the latest in a long, crooked line of blackly-comic British crime capers.

Brendan (Michael Smiley) is a solitary, taciturn man who enjoys simple, solitary pleasures – which is for the best, given he works at perhaps the loneliest toll booth in rural Pembrokeshire.…

REVIEW: Pig

Every half decade or so, Nicolas Cage will take a break from scenery chewing, or “western Kabuki” as he likes to call it, and commit to delivering a low-key character study in a well-observed indie.

In Pig, the feature debut of writer-director Michael Samoski, he subsumes himself, hunched and bearded, in the role of Rob, a reclusive truffle hunter who lives alone in the mossy forests of Oregon.…