“Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion in this town?”
Elle Reid is not your run-of-the-mill septugenarian. With her mane of dark hair and her acerbic wit, she’d look more at home at a ‘60s campus demonstration than a retirement community.…
Author: robertmwallis
Graduate of Royal Holloway and the London Film School. Founder of Of All The Film Sites; formerly Of All The Film Blogs. Formerly Film & TV Editor of The Metropolist and Official Sidekick at A Place to Hang Your Cape. Co-host of The Movie RobCast podcast (formerly Electric Shadows) and member of the Online Film Critics Society.
Get your skates on for Cold War sporting doc Red Army
The Russians have always made for great villains.
Ever since the Berlin Wall went up, we’ve been menaced by burly, no-nonsense blokes with names like Ivan Drago. It’s a different sporting arena that provides the subject for Gabe Polsky’s Red State.…
Black Mass is the parable of Johnny Depp and the Good Acting Choice
Everybody loves a good gangster film.
Whether you prefer the shadowy family drama of The Godfather or the stunning expose of Goodfellas, the criminal lifestyle lends itself to a myriad of different portrayals. In the case of Black Mass, it’s the codependent relationship between the Irish-American Mob in South Boston AKA Southie and the FBI.…
Bridge of Spies is a classic Cold War drama from the master of popular cinema
2015 was the year of onscreen espionage: Spy, Kingsman, Mission: Impossible, and, of course, Specter. Bridge of Spies seems like the first one likely to trouble Uncle Oscar.
The film opens in 1957 at the “height of the Cold War” as a title card helpfully informs us.…
The Lady in the Van is a chip (in the sugar) off the old Bennett block
For a man widely regarded as Britain’s best-loved living playwright, Alan Bennett sure does have a fixation with old ladies.
It’s a perception Bennett himself laments in The Lady in the Van. He claims he’d much rather be writing about spies.…
He Named Me Malala captures its subject’s achievement but misses out on the full story
What were you doing when you were seventeen? If your answer is “Taking the President of Nigeria to task over his failure to secure the return of kidnapped schoolgirls from Boko Haram”, then you must be Malala Yousafzai.
Now perhaps the most recognisable eighteen year-old on the planet, the activist and two-time Nobel laureate is now the subject this documentary from director Davis Guggenheim, which does justice to the scope of her achievements, if not the complexity of Malala herself.…
Steve Jobs is a near perfect fusion of functionality and artistry
What is the current fascination with technology entrepreneurs?
From The Social Network to AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, key figures in the PC movement, real or imagined, have grown to legendary status in the public consciousness. Perhaps it’s because they are ambitious dreamers, mavericks who shape the way we interact with the world — by way of example, this review was drafted on an iPhone and written up on a Macbook — or perhaps because they provide an point of entrance into the digital realm, which is otherwise so hard to dramatize.…
Manglehorn is not exactly the summit of Pacino’s career but at least it’s on the slopes
If you were looking for a word to describe Al Pacino’s acting career over the past two decades chances are “understated” would not be it.
Generally regarded as one of the finest actors ever to have graced the silver screen, it nevertheless seems sadly fitting that his only Oscar win came as the blind, bellowing Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman.…
Spectre summons up the ghosts of the Bond franchise to diminishing returns
The evocatively titled Spectre, 24th installment of the Bond franchise, is a film steeped in continuity but light on originality.
While capitalizing on the back-story laid down for Daniel Craig’s super-spy in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall – the first incarnation of the character to have much by the way of continuity – it finds the time, over the course of 138 minutes – which also makes Spectre the longest film in the franchise – to riff on nearly every previous episode from the series’ 53 year history.…
Rubble Kings: a Bronx story of hope amid blood and strife
“Warriors, come out to play-yay.”
You’ve know David Patrick Kelly’s sing-song mockery, even if you’ve never seen the film it’s in. With its gritty, lurid depiction of costumed gang warfare in ‘70s New York, The Warriors seems like a film born for cult stardom.…