The Guest is worth leaving home for

David Collins, Dan Stevens’ character in Adam Wingard’s new thriller, The Guest, would be about as far removed as you can image from Matthew Crawley, the agreeable young gentleman he played in Downton Abbey.

Well, apart from the issues of manners: David is faultlessly polite, overflowing with “Sirs” and “Ma’ams”, even while bringing destruction down upon the heads of the Peterson clan.…

As Above, So Below ends up smack in the middle

 

The Catacombs of Paris contain the remains of more than six million people.

Consisting of 200 miles of underground tunnel, much of it uncharted, to get lost down there, to lose your flashlight or to run out of water is to die.…

Night Moves is dead in the water

 

On first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d seen Night Moves before.

A tale of ambitious eco-terrorists directed by a well-respected, if relatively little-known indie director, featuring an emotionally guarded lead, a maturing young actress, and a Scandinavian-sounding “leader”.…

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For shows a franchise that should have stayed buried

 

Hollywood is usually pretty quick off the bat on commissioning sequels – often a picture’s barely made it into cinemas before a follow-up’s been green-lit – but every now and then they leave us twiddling our thumbs.

It’s been nine years since Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s hyper-visual, hyper-violent Sin City made its way onto our screens, long enough that even the most ardent fan had given up hope of a second installment.…

A Most Wanted Man is a fitting elegy to a tremendous talent (RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman)

 

Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man has the distinction of being not only the first John Le Carré adaptation to reach our screens since Tomas Alfredson’s critically acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy back in 2011, but also the last leading role of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who passed away back in February.

…

Get On Up proves there’s still some soul in the music biopic

 

For a brief time in the mid 2000s, the ’50s-60s musician biopic was the genre du jour.

The life stories of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles both hit the big screen in little over twelve months; the abstracted travails of Bob Dylan reached us two years later in the form of I’m Not There.…

Guardians of the Galaxy could be a brave new world for Marvel

 

Having come to define the superhero genre, after nine films and six years, Marvel has finally dared to go a little weird.

While there’s a definite built-in audience for the likes of Iron Man and Captain America, the Guardians of the Galaxy are relative unknowns.…

Hercules (2014) may not be the feat of filmmaking you’re hoping for

 

With Biblical epics are back in vogue thanks to Aronfosky’s Noah, Hollywood have now once more to the rich vein of Greek mythology.

With a physically exemplary Hercules – and more, a bankable star – in the form of the 6’4″, 240lb Dwayne Johnson, it seems almost inevitable that Olympus’ favourite son would be making his way back to the big screen.…

Boyhood is a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a kid

 

You hear a lot of talk about ambition in film: ambitious scale, ambitious complexity, ambitious effects.

It’s rare though that a story is ambitious simply in its conception, in its commitment to telling a story. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is such a film, a film that could be said to define his whole body of work.…

How To Train Your Dragon 2 soars high but carries little weight

 

When it comes to computer-animated family fun, the only real contender is Pixar.

Their main rival, Dreamworks, has been mostly reliant on a number of franchises: Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda. So far, though, they’re yet to produce anything to rival the artistry of Toy Story.…