REVIEW: The Father

The Father is an immaculate depiction of a man’s descent into dementia that is all the more harrowing for its formality.

Eighty-year-old Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) owns a stately flat in Maida Vale where has lived for many years. He’s charming but irascible, increasingly prone to outbursts of vitriol; like the one that has driven his latest carer to quit.…

Green Room is gut-wrenching, sometimes literally

 

Blue Ruin, Green Room. 

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is certainly not a director afraid to deal in primal colors: the bright green woodlands of Oregon into which down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights stray, playing an impromptu gig to an audience of neo-Nazis; the visceral red of the horrific gore that results when band member Pat (an endearingly mumbly Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a murder.…

Ponderous and imponderable, Knight of Cups is, like its protagonist, easily led


 

Knight of Cups is a film you could drown in – a vast thematic ocean lapping against the distant shore of some grand, obscure vision. And I don’t have any f**king trunks.

As a director-philosopher (or should that be philosopher-director?),…

Filth is a raunchy, foul-mouthed bit of soul searching for a maniacal James McAvoy

 

The medical standard for Irvine Welsh adaptations is undoubtedly still Trainspotting, made back in the midst of the Britpop era (1996).

Since there have been two further attempts to bring his works to the bring screen – The Acid House and the explicitly titled Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy – but, as with Chuck Palahuik and Fight Club, no one’s been able to recapture the magic.

A Late Quartet shows what happens when four lives fall in and out of harmony

 

An experienced cellist’s carefully ordered life disintegrates when he is diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s.

A monomaniacal first violinist struggles with suppressed passions when a beautiful young student lays claim to his affections. A husband, an insecure second violinist, and wife, a brittle viola player, flounder when forced to confront the reality of their failing marriage.…