REVIEW: King Richard (London Film Festival 2021)

King Richard is an unconventional biopic about an unlikely sporting figure.

Having received his first Oscar nomination in Michael Mann’s Ali back in 2002, Will Smith may finally walk away with the little gold man for his performance as Richard Williams, father to Venus and Serena Williams.…

REVIEW: The Peanut Butter Falcon [LFF 2019]

By Rob Daniel

 

 

A contender for 2019’s best crowd-pleaser, The Peanut Butter Falcon is a celebration of friendship and adventure. A joyous movie leaving you with an aching face after ninety-minutes of smiling.

Alongside the delight is an admiration for the skill with which writer/directors Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz (under the banner Lucky Treehouse) put their movie together.…

REVIEWS: Widows (London Film Festival 2018 – Day 1)

A bedroom embrace is wrenched away and instantly replaced with the rear compartment of a getaway van, one door wrenched off its hinge and sparking on the asphalt, as a lover’s playful snarl becomes the shriek of a bullet, ricocheting around the exposed interior.…

Fury is a war film full of sound and signifying a lot

 

Is there anything quite so cinematic as war? The mud, the blood, the bullets, the explosions; the scale, the intimacy; the stakes, both large and small.

An elegantly uniformed rider on a pale horse makes his way through a graveyard of shattered military hardware.…

The Wolf of Wall Street: Scorsese howling into the void?

Apart from perhaps Steven Spielberg, the career of Martin Scorsese is unparalleled in the last fifty years of Hollywood.

Not only does his contribution to cinema define an entire genre – name a modern crime film that doesn’t owe some debt to Goodfellas – he consistently seems to take on only the films that he wants to make, only the projects that interest him.…