Search Results for: moonlight

Collateral Beauty gets it as right as it can in service of a bad idea

Collateral Beauty is a awards-baiting drama about three big-city advertising execs who come together to gas-light their grieving friend for the sake of a big payday.

Okay, so it’s not quite as a simple as that, morality-wise; a fact that the film is desperate to impress upon us.…

LFF Day 2: A Monster Calls & The Handmaiden

Fantastical trauma counseling and opulent Gothic fetishism on London Film Festival Day 2.

 

The Orphanage‘s J.A. Bayona began his career as an acolyte of Guillermo Del Toro and in A Monster Calls he finds his own Pan’s Labyrinth – but one where the monsters make house calls.

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Free State of Jones: a restrained but impassioned anti-slavery drama overtaken by history

Almost twenty years on from Spielberg’s Amistad, who would have thought that we’d be talking about any film that doesn’t see Matthew McConaughey as a serious Oscar contender as something of a disappointment?

Opening in the midst of the American Civil War with a battalion of grey-suited Confederate soldiers marching calmly to their deaths – their ranks thinning as the least fortunate among them fall underfoot – Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones initially feels more like reenactment than dramatization.…

Irrational Man is the cinematic equivalent of artisanal popcorn

Woody Allen has got it made.

Despite the allegations against him that have come to light in recent years – I bring this up only to say that I don’t have a stance to take – he gets to jet off once a year to wherever takes his fancy and shoot a film there with, it seems, any actor who takes his fancy; though mostly young, attractive ones of late.…

RED 2 is a perfectly good geri-actioner

 

Do you remember my review of A Good Day to Die Hard, all the way back in the mists of time?

There’s no reason for you to, but in it I aired my complaints with what has become of the series that gave Bruce Willis a career beyond Moonlighting.…