REVIEW: Wind River & mother!

Wind River

After penning the Sicario, set in the sun-bleached badland of Juarez, Mexico, and Hell or High Water, which plays out in scrubby, unforgiving West Texas, Taylor Sheridan heads north with Wind River.

His directorial follow-up to 2011’s Saw-alike VileWind River takes place amidst the seemingly endless snowy plains and forested peaks of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming; a frozen waste that never seems to get the memo about arrival of summer.…

REVIEW: God’s Own Country

Described by some as a British Brokeback, or perhaps a Maltby Moonlight, Francis Lee’s directorial debut has a character all its own: a rough, tender, distinctly Yorkshire love story.

Based partly on Lee’s own upbringing, God’s Own Country follows the travails of Johnny (Josh O’Connor), a nervy, inarticulate young man who’s stuck running the family farm when his dad Martin (Ian Hart) is left debilitated by a stroke.…

REVIEW: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

“How’s things in the coloured-people-torturing business?”

It’s been five years since Martin McDonagh’s second film, the deeply violent, profoundly meta—, occasionally strangely touching Seven Psychopaths, swept through cinemas. Since then his older brother, John Michael McDonagh, has overtaken him in the cinematic stakes with his second and third film.…

REVIEW DOUBLE BILL: Daphne & Final Portrait

Daphne

The feature debut of filmmaker Peter Mackie Burns, Daphne isn’t so much about finding yourself as just figuring out you’re lost.

Daphne (Emily Beecham) is a stylishly insouciant redhead in her early thirties, living and working in contemporary London.

She gets drunk on a nightly basis and hooks up with random guys.…

REVIEW DOUBLE BILL: American Made & The Limehouse Golem

American Made

Scarface, 1932 and ‘83. Goodfellas. The Wolf of Wall Street. War Dogs. American Made is just the latest film to take aim at the dark, opportunistic side of the American dream.

“Based on a true story”, as such films generally are, American Made is the story of Barry Seal, a pilot extraordinaire turned TWA lifer, recruited by the CIA in 1978.…

REVIEW GRAB-BAG: The Dark Tower, Logan Lucky, & The Hitman’s Bodyguard

The Dark Tower

Or How to Make Soup out of Stephen King’s Keystone Series.

In brief: Take an epic eight-book series inspired by both Lord of the Rings and Spaghetti Westerns, strip away the character and the uniqueness, boil down the mythology and the plot, and reduce to 95 minutes.…

REVIEW DOUBLE BILL: Atomic Blonde & Shin Godzilla

Atomic Blonde

James Blonde. Joan Wick. Taken with a pinch of Salt.

It may sound derivative, but it’s a formula that can reap bountiful rewards. You take a frosty cool female lead, drop them into a previously male-dominated genre, and unleash their ass-kicking potential.…

REVIEW: The Emoji Movie – sad face, poop emoji, poop emoji, fuck this shit

Now I usually enjoy giving a terrible film a booting as much as the next reviewer, but there’s something about The Emoji Movie that’s so utterly dispiriting that it even takes the joy out of that.

Rather than simply being utterly misjudged in the way that, say, Batman V Supermanthat redoubtable object of loathing for me, was misjudged – The Emoji Movie gives no impression that anyone ever sincerely expected it to be good.…

REVIEW: Detroit – anger on the streets, horror at the Algiers Motel

Returning from a five-year hiatus, director Kathryn Bigelow seems likely to trouble Academy again with a film that, unlike the ambiguously pro-torture Zero Dark Thirty, shows the real factors at play behind “enhanced interrogation”.

A hard-hitting depiction of racial animus in America, Detroit opens with an animated prologue that uses vivid, mural-style artwork – like the wall of some grand municipal station brought to life – to lay out the plight of African-Americans in the lead up to 1967.…