REVIEW: The Last Sacrifice

England still likes to remember itself its B&W heyday: BBC newsreels narrated in perfect RP, thatched cottages, fields rolling merrily into eternity.

Rupert Russell’s The Last Sacrifice starts inside that bucolic dream — and then slashes it open.

On Valentine’s Day, 1945, on Meon Hill, Warwickshire, elderly farm labourer Charles Walton was found murdered with his own tools; pinned to the earth with a pitchfork, his neck slashed by a billhook.…

REVIEW: He Dreams of Giants

Writing about He Dreams of Giants feels a bit like Kirk Lazarus talking about his acting process.

2002’s Lost in La Mancha was a making-of in search of a finished product. Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, whose troubled production it documents, was one of the great unfinished movies – until it wasn’t.…

PODCAST: Greenland & News of the World [Movie RobCast]

It’s been a minute since our last episode so #110 is a bumper wrap-up of what the Robs have been watching.

First, the shocking revelation that Gerard Butler has made a good movie with end-of-days disaster movie Greenland, currently available on Amazon Prime.…

LFF Days 4-6: The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Voyage of Time, Bleed For This, Personal Shopper, & A Quiet Passion

Sorry for the delay if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the London Film Festival. I’ve been a bit lax in getting it written up.

Even so, enjoy these capsule reviews of everything I saw over the course of Days 4-6.

He Named Me Malala captures its subject’s achievement but misses out on the full story

 

What were you doing when you were seventeen? If your answer is “Taking the President of Nigeria to task over his failure to secure the return of kidnapped schoolgirls from Boko Haram”, then you must be Malala Yousafzai.

Now perhaps the most recognisable eighteen year-old on the planet, the activist and two-time Nobel laureate is now the subject this documentary from director Davis Guggenheim, which does justice to the scope of her achievements, if not the complexity of Malala herself.…

Rubble Kings: a Bronx story of hope amid blood and strife

 

“Warriors, come out to play-yay.”

You’ve know David Patrick Kelly’s sing-song mockery, even if you’ve never seen the film it’s in. With its gritty, lurid depiction of costumed gang warfare in ‘70s New York, The Warriors seems like a film born for cult stardom.…

Is this the (Brothers) Quay to Nolan’s whole oeuvre?

 

As arguably the foremost director of high-brow cinematic entertainment on the planet, it seems reasonable that Christopher Nolan might want to take a breather between blockbusters.

After the $165 million universe-spanning epic that was Interstellar you can’t get much more palette cleanser-y than an eight-minute behind-the-scenes of the magical junk shop-workshop of a pair of stop-motion animators.…