REVIEW: Maestro [London Film Festival 2023]

Maestro is a film obsessed with virtuosity.

Given the rapturous reception of his directorial debut, 2018’s A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper, who also stars, co-writes, and produces, has stacked the deck somewhat with his biopic of esteemed American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein.…

REVIEW: Saltburn [London Film Festival 2023]

Having thoroughly skewered the male-female power dynamic in Promising Young Woman, in Saltburn Emerald Fennell turns her withering eye on another social structure: the British class system.

Newly arrived at Oxford University, scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), bright, studious, and dressed like Harry Potter newly arrived at Hogwarts – all house scarf and specs – struggles to fit in amid the bright young things.…

PODCAST: Promising Young Woman & Godzilla vs. Kong [Movie Robcast]

Episode 113 of The Movie Robcast sees the Robs in the same physical space for the first time since December!

In the shadow of the glorious BFI IMAX at Waterloo they run through multiple movie related topics.

First up is Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning Promising Young Woman, featuring a first-rate performance from Carey Mulligan, also nominated for Hollywood’s most coveted award.…

REVIEW: Promising Young Woman

A revenge thriller from a former show runner on Killing Eve, Promising Young Woman is every bit as stylish and unique as that pedigree suggests.

It’s a bitter trope that young, male abusers are spared the full brunt of the just system due to their status as a “promising young man”.…

REVIEW: Mudbound & Wonderstruck (LFF Day 2)

Mudbound

“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of sorrow.”

It’s misery and anguish that are the heart of Mudbound, Dee Rees’ Netflix-bound period drama about farmers in early 20th Century Mississippi.…

Suffragette is a worthy but overly respectable

 

As with The Imitation Game, which kicked off last year’s London Film Festival, Suffragette — another period drama — is a quintessential work of British cinema. It too tells an important story.

Instead of the huts of Bletchley Park, we find ourselves at an East End laundry circa 1913, the workplace of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and dozens of other industrious women.…

Inside Llewyn Davis: an arsehole’s eclectic journey through the Greenwich Village scene

The Coen Brothers might have delved into spiritual music before in O Brother, Where Art Thou, their myth-inspired take on the Depression-era American Deep South, but Inside Llewyn Davis is a far more focused piece of cinema, if never quite as colorful as its predecessor.

The Great Gatsby is a glorious encapsulation of the Roaring Twenties but has little to say for it

Great literary adaptations can occur in the most unexpected of places.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of fiction ever written and its 1962 adaptation starring Gregory Peck comes in at #25 on the AFI’s list of greatest American movies.…