Trainspotting
It’s no fun growing hold. Hair migrates, weight accrues, and you find yourself stuck in bad habits.
Unlike its predecessor, T2: Trainspotting is less concerned with one particular bad habit – heroin – and more with the myriad other ways in which an older, supposedly more mature human being can self-destruct.…
What is the worst thing you could do to yourself, and under what circumstance might such a thing be not only permitted but necessary?
This, in general terms, is the central question of Silence, a long-term passion project by Martin Scorsese and the latest of his works to tackle with the burden of religious conviction.…
Live By Night is a “lavish gangster epic” of the sort in which Hollywood used to specialize.
A throwback in more ways than one, it’s also an old-fashioned star vehicle for its director Ben Affleck.
Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (as was Affleck’s directorial debut), Live By Night sees the Boston native back on home turf — albeit a century out of time— as Joe Coughlin, a smooth stick-up artist who returns to America after the Great War.…
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.…
It’s clear that Justin Kurtzel, director of Assassin’s Creed, didn’t want to make just any old video-game movie. In fact, it seems clear that he didn’t really want to make a video-game adaptation at all.
Indeed, that’s just about the only thing that is clear in this adaptation of the long-running Ubisoft franchise, which manages to drain all the fun from the premise.…
It’s already become a cliche: the extent to which 2016 has notoriously not been a good year for humanity.
That said, it’s been at least a decent year for film – minus the deaths of various beloved cinema icons (UPDATE: since my writing this, Carrie Fisher has sadly passed away).…
Blackness. Orchestral strings rise up magisterially but sink almost immediately into discord; the wooziest of dying falls.
A beautiful woman, resplendent in pink, with jet-black bouffant hair, porcelain hair, and cheekbones to shame Bette Davis, coolly applies her makeup in an airplane mirror.…
Releasing your film as close as you can to the Oscar deadline may keep it fresh in the mind of Academy voters, but it does make it tricky to keep a track of for your more casual viewer.
Throw in the time delay between US and UK releases and even the most fervent cineaste could be forgiven for forgetting exactly when their favorite film was released.…
Films do not have to be dark in order to be profound. Sometimes the human condition can, in fact, be hopeful.
No better is this demonstrated than in Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s heartfelt ode to blue-collar life in all its ordinary extraordinariness.…
Robs Daniel & Wallis do a late night review of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, having just watched the movie. Slightly tired (and punchy), the two embark on a spellbinding odyssey that covers inter-species coupling, the right way to cast spells, Eddie Redmayne’s fictitiously Batesian relationship with his mum and comparing King Kong to Sonny Corleone.
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