RETROSPECTIVE: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai [Blu-ray]

“The Way of the Samurai is found in death.”

With Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, it seems like Jim Jamursch set out to make the coolest movie ever.

An RZA-soundtracked crime-drama in which a cornrow-wearing Samurai-hitman played by Forest Whitaker must take on the Italian Mafia?…

Rogue One: helpfully titled man on mission movie; also Star Wars

Ever so slightly longer ago in a galaxy pretty well-known to us at this point…

After forty years of galactic-scale family squabbles among the Skywalker clan, Disney’s latest addition to the franchise seeks to remind us that there are other families in the Star Wars universe… to a point.…

Arrival is a Möbius strip movie that home-schools Interstellar

Oh for the days of Close Encounters when we dreamed that first contact would be as elegant as five simple notes.

Arrival, the latest film from Sicario director Denis Villeneuve1, looks at the complexities of communicating with an alien race.1 When twelve mysterious craft appear at sites around the globe, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is drafted in to help start a dialogue with their occupants before China and Russia set off an inter-species war.2 Where do you begin, though, when you know nothing about their language or customs?…

London Film Festival 2016: 10 films to get excited about

Well, it’s that time of the year again.

It’s a well-known but little commented upon phenomenon that each year Christmas comes to London roughly three months early – at least for capital-based cinema buffs – as, each October, the BFI hosts the London Film Festival.…

The Butler is content to carry water

 

2013 has been a year for many things.

Hostage crises in Algeria and North Korean nuclear tests, 3D printers and a meteor explosion over Russia. Meanwhile, the NSA’s been spying on everyone and Justin Bieber has been taking up the headlines in “Teenage-Boy-With-Unlimited-Power-Behaves-Like-Dickhead Shock”.