REVIEW: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets makes imagination boring

The space opera is well on its way to becoming my least favourite genre; romcoms included.

Embracing a gaudily frenetic aesthetic may make for a great splash panel in a comic book but it rarely leads to satisfying cinema. Case in point: Luc Besson’s latest, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.…

REVIEW: The Big Sick – a relationship comedy where one party is out for the count

It’s been said that comedy is a natural response to tragedy; indeed, humour is proven to speed recovery.[none]Patch Adams can still fuck off, though.[/note]

Even so, taking perhaps the worst period of your life and turning it into a romcom, that most disposable of genres, is certainly a bold move.…

REVIEW: Dunkirk; or my thoughts on time & tide in Nolan’s masterpiece of immediacy and magnitude

Christopher Nolan is arguably the foremost British director of his generation, certainly when it comes to visionary blockbusters.

As such, it seems strange that he should follow the – literal – universality of 2014’s Interstellar with a film that seems, on the face of it, so self-contained; parochial even.…

REVIEW: War for The Planet of the Apes is a hugely ambitious genre-jumping blockbuster

Is there anything more perfectly, absurdly cinematic than an ape riding on horseback through the snow?

“If man evolved from a monkey then why are there still monkey?” Reportedly a favoured argument of creationists, the answer to this question is relatively simple in layman’s terms: we went one way; they went another.…

REVIEW: Scribe is a well-made but slightly rote conspiracy thriller

Scribe (French: The Eavesdropper) is a classic conspiracy thriller in ambition if not in atmosphere.

François Cluzet plays Duval, a conscientious, middle-aged office worker who suffers a drink-exacerbated breakdown.

Out of work for two years and abandoned by his wife, he seeks not only an income but a framework to his life.…

REVIEW: The Beguiled (2017) replaces melodrama with subtle, sultry power play

We open on black, as we know all important films must.

When we fade in, it’s on a little girl in a checked skirt, wandering beneath the hanging moss of a long dark tunnel of oak trees. When she gently picks mushrooms from the dirt, we can almost hear their stalks part; so quiet and eerie is the locale.…

REVIEW: Spider-Man: Homecoming is a triumphant return for the now-adolescent wall-crawler

After taking on joint parenting duties with Sony, Marvel has gifted Spider-Man a new lease of life.

Set immediately after the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming drops over-enthusiastic fifteen-year-old Peter Parker (Tom Holland) back into high school.…

REVIEW: It Comes At Night goes nowhere in particular

Why lay the table for a feast if you’re not going to serve a meal that can complete with the place setting?

It’s this shortcoming that ultimately prevents It Comes At Night from becoming more than just another addition to the, in recent years, surprisingly well-worn genre of post-apocalyptic drama-horror.…

REVIEW: Baby Driver is a stylish but forgettable remix of the classic getaway movie

Meet Baby (Ansel Elgort).

He’s not quite your average wheelman.

He looks like the lovechild of Ferris Bueller and a young, slightly goofier Harrison Ford (right down to the Han Solo waistcoat), and always has a pair of sunglasses at the ready.…

Transformers: The Last Knight owes fealty to every major blockbuster in recent history

CONTAINS SPOILERS

A barbarian horde swarms across a green-gray hillscape, their cries rending the air.

The earth is torn beneath their feet and the hooves of horses.

Sword meets sword; shield, shield.

Balls of fire envelop the unfortunate and unwary.

A small band in steel breastplates prepare to renew the charge against overwhelming odds.…