REVIEW: Wind River & mother!

Wind River

After penning the Sicario, set in the sun-bleached badland of Juarez, Mexico, and Hell or High Water, which plays out in scrubby, unforgiving West Texas, Taylor Sheridan heads north with Wind River.

His directorial follow-up to 2011’s Saw-alike VileWind River takes place amidst the seemingly endless snowy plains and forested peaks of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming; a frozen waste that never seems to get the memo about arrival of summer.…

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.…

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation doesn’t miss a beat

 

Another Mission: Impossible film, another meaningless subtitle.

As the season of the super-spy commences – Man from UNCLE promises slick self-referential silliness, SPECTRE seems likely to continue the trend of Bond as dark, ambitious psychological thriller – Tom Cruise returns to the role of IMF agent Ethan Hunt, by now probably the most disavowed person in cinema history.…

Bourne Legacy ultimately has nowhere to run

 

I’ll admit to having been been dismissive of this addition to the Bourne series when it appeared in cinemas last year.

For one thing, Paul Greengrass, director of Bourne’s Supremacy and Ultimatum, had handed over control of the franchise, and perhaps more dramatically, Matt Damon, Jason Bourne himself, would not be returning.…