Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Last Night in Soho (London Film Festival 2021)

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is both a love letter to the allure of the Swinging Sixties and a cautionary tale about the corruption beneath.

When Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to London to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer, she’s unprepared for life in student accommodation.…

REVIEW: Spencer (London Film Festival 2021)

In his latest film, Pablo Larraín continues to play out our fascination with private lives and public personas.

Spencer gives us a woman on the verge of a breakdown during one final, terrible Christmas with her forbidding in-laws. It just so happens that the woman is Diana, Princess of Wales, and the in-laws are the British Royal Family.…

REVIEW: The Harder They Fall (London Film Festival 2021)

The opening gala of this year’s London Film Festival, The Harder They Fall is a classic Spaghetti Western with a few incendiary extra ingredients: all-star cast, stylised violence, pounding bass.

The feature debut of writer-director Jeymes Samuel, the film recasts historical figures from the Old West as combatants in a bloody, stylised tale of revenge.…

PODCAST: No Time to Die [Movie RobCast]

Episode 127 of The Movie Robcast is a license to thrill affair.

With No Time to Die finally released in cinemas, Robs Daniel & Wallis can let loose their opinions of Daniel Craig’s final 007 outing.

Unsurprisingly, they have plenty to talk about.…

REVIEW: The Toll

Described by director Ryan Andrew Hooper as a “West Walian Western”, The Toll is the latest in a long, crooked line of blackly-comic British crime capers.

Brendan (Michael Smiley) is a solitary, taciturn man who enjoys simple, solitary pleasures – which is for the best, given he works at perhaps the loneliest toll booth in rural Pembrokeshire.…

REVIEW: Pig

Every half decade or so, Nicolas Cage will take a break from scenery chewing, or “western Kabuki” as he likes to call it, and commit to delivering a low-key character study in a well-observed indie.

In Pig, the feature debut of writer-director Michael Samoski, he subsumes himself, hunched and bearded, in the role of Rob, a reclusive truffle hunter who lives alone in the mossy forests of Oregon.…

REVIEW: Gunpowder Milkshake [Sky Cinema]

Gunpowder Milkshake is the latest in a line of hyper-stylised, neo-noir action-thrillers going back to John Wick.

At the time it was a welcome change of pace from the no-frills, Liam-Neeson-on-an-x that was dominating the genre. Seven years, though, all that neon is beginning to pall.…

REVIEW: The Comeback Trail [Sky Cinema]

The Comeback Trail is a cheesy, intermittently charming comedy caper elevated by the strength of its cast.

A remake of the 1982 comedy of the same name, it stars Robert DeNiro as Max Barber, a small-time movie producer in 70s Hollywood.…

REVIEW: Black Widow [Disney+]

For a while, it seemed like the Marvel Cinematic Universe was one of the great constants, alongside death and taxes. Then Covid hit and even Disney had to duck for cover.

Now, more than two years after Spider-Man: Far From Home, the MCU makes its return to the big screen – as well as home entertainment, after a slight delay – but has the magic returned with it?…

REVIEW: The Tomorrow War [Prime Video]

The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb sci-fi actioner with an actual semi-functioning emotional component.

Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is an ex Green Beret now working as a high-school chemistry teacher. His life with wife Emmy (Betty Gilpin, underutilised) and young daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is idyllic, though Dan is struggling to break into the field of research science.…