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Wes Anderson’s latest is a retro-futurist ’50s postcard that touches intriguingly, if perhaps too lightly, on the theme of making sense of meaninglessness.
Framed as an episode of a black-and-white anthology drama series, complete with Serling stand-in (Bryan Cranston), Asteroid City is at once about the making of a fictional play and a televised colour production of that play.…
Some movies seem purposefully designed for critics to have fun with, if not necessarily cinema audiences. Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic is just such a movie.
From its hopelessly dated, sub 00s-Nolan sci-fi thriller premise to its almost comically one-note lead performance – Affleck’s expressions range from a frown to a grimace to a scowl – to the oh-so generic title, it’s an inducement to snarky headlines, like “Hypnotic put me to sleep.”…
If given incontrovertible proof of the afterlife, how would mankind respond? As speculations go, it’s a biggie – one worthy of any number of dramatic explorations.
The first I’ve seen to tackle it is Next Exit, the feature debut of writer-director Mali Elfman, who uses the premise less for its paradigm-shifting potential than to ask a much simpler, more human-level question: what is it that makes life living?…
Gerard Butler stars in a lightly-engineered action-thriller whose pleasures are as simple as its title.
Easily formulated as Die Hard meets Lost, Plane serves up gritty run n’ gun in the sun fun.
When a freak lightening strike forces him to crash-land on a remote island of the Philippines, budget airline pilot Brodie Torrance (Butler) has to figure out how to get his meagre bunch of passengers back to civilisation – that’s if the pissed-off insurgents don’t get them first.…
We’re immersed in wormy, swimmy static; an impenetrable, buzzy, blue-brown alphabet soup of meaningless hieroglyphics. It obscures the depths of already-darkened rooms, masking spaces where monsters might hide.
An experimental horror rom first-time director Kyle Edward Ball, Skinamarink is a film of perception, or imperception.…
Mark Jenkin’s is one of the most evocative auteurs working in Britain. Bait, my film of the year for 2019, looked like a government-sponsored documentary from the ‘50s, a grainy, black-and-white relic recovered from the coast of Cornwall. It was unique, unclassifiable.…
They just don’t make ’em like they used to, though they try.
The Old Way is a by-the-books Western, distinguished only by being Nicolas Cage’s “first” out-and-out foray into the genre.
When we first encounter outlaw Colton Briggs (Cage, complete with droopy mustache), he’s watching a public hanging preceded over by his employer, a self-righteous local bigwig.…
Tom Hanks’ is a curmudgeon with a heart of gold in this English-language adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s Swedish bestseller A Man Called Ove.
Rechristened Otto for an American audience, we first encounter Hanks’ titular grouch at the hardware store. He wants a length of rope for a home DIY project and he’s brought his own knife to cut it to order; behaviour that the store staff understandably struggles with.…
This latest offering from DC Films has many of of the right elements, but struggles to ground itself in humanity.
Re-envisioning its title character as an antihero, Black Adam is a star vehicle for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, for whom it was reportedly a passion project.…
White Noise
With White Noise, Noah Baumbach has managed to make a compelling and remarkably coherent dramedy from Don DeLillo’s postmodern epic of optimism and catastrophe.
Jack Gladney (Adam Driver; winningly ungainly with long limbs and beer belly) is a renowned professor of “Hitler studies”, who works at a fictional American college sometime in the 1980s.…
