In The Last Duel, Ridley Scott returns to his cinematic first love.
The idea of two rivals in a duel to the death is an innately romantic one, but where Scott’s directorial debut was devoted to it, in his latest it’s both beginning and ending.…
Category: Reviews
PODCAST: Dune [Movie Robcast]
![PODCAST: Dune [Movie Robcast]](http://ofallthefilmsites.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/dune2.jpg)
Episode 128 of The Movie Robcast whisks you away to the faraway world of Arrakis for our review of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.
Can Villeneuve succeed where David Lynch failed back in 1984, and land Frank Herbert’s epic novel, the Great White Whale of sci-fi literature?…
REVIEW: King Richard (London Film Festival 2021)
King Richard is an unconventional biopic about an unlikely sporting figure.
Having received his first Oscar nomination in Michael Mann’s Ali back in 2002, Will Smith may finally walk away with the little gold man for his performance as Richard Williams, father to Venus and Serena Williams.…
REVIEW: The Tragedy of Macbeth (London Film Festival 2021)
In his first single-handed filmmaking venture, Joel Coen (best known as one half of the Coen Bros.) takes on Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Shot entirely on set, with sharp, black-&-white cinematography courtesy of Bruce Delbonnel, the film’s striking, otherworldly visuals, inky shadows and slanting light, owe a debt to German Expressionism.…
REVIEW: Venom: Let There Be Carnage
It’s weird to call a blockbuster an unexpected hit, but 2018’s Venom was a rather modest affair for a superhero movie.
Intended to spin-off Sony’s part ownership of Spider-Man into a cinematic universe of their own, Venom made more than $800 million at the global office; a sum to rival Sony’s Jumanji reboot from the year before.…
REVIEW: Halloween Kills
The only thing shocking in Halloween Kills is that it came from same creative team behind Halloween (2018).
It’s Halloween night, 2018, and Laurie Strode’s home is ablaze. She (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Alison (Andi Matichak) are blooded and traumatised, but alive.…
REVIEW: The Beta Test
The Beta Test is both a commentary on the artificiality of the modern world and the difficulty of making genuine human connections.
Jordan (writer-director-actor Jim Cummings) is a slick, smarmy Hollywood agent, preparing to get married to his fiancée Caroline (Virginia Newcomb).…
REVIEW: The Lost Daughter (London Film Festival 2021)
The Lost Daughter is an honest and assured psychological study of what it means to be, or not to be, a parent.
Leda (Olivia Colman) is a middle-aged literary professor on a solitary summer holiday in Italy. Her contentment, lying on the beach, marking her papers, is disrupted by the arrival of a large, brash American family, who lay their claim to the beach.…
REVIEW: The Phantom of the Open (London Film Festival 2021)
The Phantom of the Open is the ultimate underdog story – insofar as dogs don’t come much more under than Maurice Flitcroft. Eddie the Eagle looks positively overqualified by comparison.
Maurice (winningly playedby Mark Rylance) is a middle-aged crane driver in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, who has deferred his dreams for the sake of his family.…
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.…