REVIEW: The Killer (2023) [London Film Festival 2023]

Three years on from the roaring historical drama of Mank, David Fincher returns with The Killer, a chilly, methodical thriller very much rooted in the present.

The Killer (Michael Fassbender, coolly compelling) is a professional.

His working life is meticulous, based on a routine designed to help him perform with maximum efficiency.…

REVIEW: The Snowman

Who butchered The Snowman?

This utterly clueless adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s bestseller fails on every conceivable level. What seems like a reliable basis for an atmospheric Nordic Noir becomes instead a trudge through rote scenarios and underdone psychology. So who is responsible?…

CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: The Great Wall & Trespass Against Us

The Great Wall

To misquote the film’s tagline, “Three years, $150 million to make, what were they hoping to prove?”.

Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall is at best a misguided curiosity – people kept trooping in and out of my screening like it was a visitor’s ward.…

Assassin’s Creed: bored game

It’s clear that Justin Kurtzel, director of Assassin’s Creed, didn’t want to make just any old video-game movie. In fact, it seems clear that he didn’t really want to make a video-game adaptation at all.

Indeed, that’s just about the only thing that is clear in this adaptation of the long-running Ubisoft franchise, which manages to drain all the fun from the premise.…

X-Men: Apocalypse blows through quickly and entertainingly enough

 

In the hinterland between the extreme competency of Marvel and the trainwreck-clusterfuck that is the DC Cinematic Universe there lies the X-Men.

With its respectable (but by no means perfect) batting average and increasingly dysfunctional relationship with continuity, the franchise is a fairly unique position with regards to superhero movies.…

Kurtzel’s Macbeth lacks not only significance but sound and fury too

 

What do you think is the greatest Shakespeare adaptation ever committed to celluloid?

Perhaps you favor the expressionistic majesty and revelry of Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, or maybe the jazzy, black-and-white sophistication of Joss Whedon’s contemporary Much Ado.…

Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth lacks not just significance but sound and fury

What do you think is the greatest Shakespeare adaptation ever committed to celluloid?

Perhaps you favor the expressionistic majesty and revelry of Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, or maybe the jazzy, black-and-white sophistication of Joss Whedon’s contemporary Much Ado. For all the promise of its conception, Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth does not stand among their exalted ranks.

Steve Jobs is a near perfect fusion of functionality and artistry

 

What is the current fascination with technology entrepreneurs?

From The Social Network to AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, key figures in the PC movement, real or imagined, have grown to legendary status in the public consciousness. Perhaps it’s because they are ambitious dreamers, mavericks who shape the way we interact with the world — by way of example, this review was drafted on an iPhone and written up on a Macbook — or perhaps because they provide an point of entrance into the digital realm, which is otherwise so hard to dramatize.…

Slow West, my son: Go see

 

The genre in which John Wayne once set out to kill his niece because she’d had hands laid on her by an “Injun” has become more reflective in recent years; elegiac even.

The Western is now less concerned with drawling former Confederates and more about allegory, about the decline of myth and the uncertain rise of civilization al a Unforgiven or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.…

X-Men: Days Of Future Past is like a dog chasing its tail – fun but circuitous

 

It’s been fourteen years since the X-Men franchise first graced our cinema screens.

That’s roughly the length of time it took Star Trek to go from The Motion Picture to Generations, the film when we finally bade farewell to William Shatner’s Captain James T.…