REVIEW: The Toll

Described by director Ryan Andrew Hooper as a “West Walian Western”, The Toll is the latest in a long, crooked line of blackly-comic British crime capers.

Brendan (Michael Smiley) is a solitary, taciturn man who enjoys simple, solitary pleasures – which is for the best, given he works at perhaps the loneliest toll booth in rural Pembrokeshire.…

REVIEW: Gunpowder Milkshake [Sky Cinema]

Gunpowder Milkshake is the latest in a line of hyper-stylised, neo-noir action-thrillers going back to John Wick.

At the time it was a welcome change of pace from the no-frills, Liam-Neeson-on-an-x that was dominating the genre. Seven years, though, all that neon is beginning to pall.…

Free Fire (LFF Day 10)

Say what you want about overvaulting cinematic ambitions – I’m looking at you, Terrence – it’s sometimes refreshing to see a talented filmmaker take on a simple concept and carry it off with flair and aplomb.

In the case of Free Fire, the latest from British auteur Ben Wheatley, the concept is this: the third-act shootout, with which any self-respecting crime thriller must surely culminate, instead kicks off less than twenty minutes in and occupies the rest of its ninety-minute run-time.…

Orthodox is too by-the-book to make much of an impact

 

Is there any sport so cinematic as boxing?

Its grace and brutality lend themselves to celluloid, and especially the breed of tormented protagonist that tends to accompany them. Far from the glossy Hollywood melodramas that have defined the genre in recent years, the astutely named Orthodox counterpoints the sweet science with a new subject: faith.…

The Lobster is a blackly heartfelt chimera of a romcom

 

You wait for one comedy about men being transformed into animals then two come along at once — a non-mating pair, if you will.

But where Kevin Smith’s Tusk was about a vicious comic forcibly losing his humanity due to a mad experiment, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is altogether more social and universal.…

The World’s End is business as usual for the Cornetto bunch

 

My, haven’t we grown?

It’s been six years since Hot Fuzz blasted onto our screen, John Woo-style, both guns blazing, and a further three since Shaun of the Dead introduced us to arguably the foremost British comedy duo in cinema today (sorry Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan).…

A Field in England is a work of esoterica to be treasured

 “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.”

— William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene ii

Wind rustles the dry grass; in the distance the shriek of cannonade, the resounding boom of cannonballs in dirt.…