Film Reviews
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18 January 2008No Country For Old Men + Everyone loves the Coen Brothers, surely? Over the last two decades, the oddball pair have produced some of the weirdest and most wonderful movies ever to have come out of America - quirky yet accessible, and always with a streak of deliciously black humour running throughout.The Coens have given us that modern icon, Jeff Bridges' White Russian-supping bowling layabout The Dude in their biggest hit, The Big Lebowski. -
18 January 2008In the Valley of Elah + Films about the psychological aftermath of war have a long and generally speaking highly distinguished history. -
18 January 2008Sweeney Todd 1 Love him for his quirky visual style or hate him for his apparently deliberate appeal to that subsection of the teenage market that dresses in black all the time, mostly while writing dire poetry about death and unrequited love, Tim Burton is undoubtedly one of the more interesting and individual of mainstream Hollywood directors. -
26 October 2007Fred Claus + One of the major benefits of the spread of the internet and the boom in movie piracy has been that the big American studios have finally begun to release their films world-wide at approximately the same time. -
26 October 2007Elizabeth: The Golden Age + 1997's Elizabeth, dealing with the early years of Queen Elizabeth I and her difficult passage to the throne, was a glorious example of the most lavish kind of period drama. -
26 October 2007Lions for Lambs 1 Say what you like about Tom Cruise, he certainly knows how to pick his films. -
26 October 2007Beowulf + In the wake of the massive success of The Lord of the Rings, little wonder that Hollywood's been scrabbling around for other fantasy epics to bring to the big screen, now that the technology is finally good enough to create the kind of strange creatures with which such legendary settings abound. -
26 October 2007American Gangster 1 OK, so the last team-up between director Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, last year's film adaptation of A Year in Provence that was A Good Year, may have been critically panned and largely ignored by cinemagoers.Yes, Scott's outing before that, 2005's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, was likewise slated and shunned. -
26 October 2007Sleuth + What is it with doing remakes of classic Michael Caine films? Haven't they learned by now? We've had the glossy but utterly facile Jude Law-starring remake of Alfie, which singularly managed to remove any of the easy cool and charm from that wonderfully misogynistic character, and ripped out the deep sense of melancholy at the heart of the original film in the process. -
26 October 2007The Darjeeling Limited + The fifth film by oddball director Wes Anderson - he of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic fame - was always going to be much anticipated.Anderson's films have a wonderful tendency to be both decidedly quirky and gloriously affecting comic character studies quite unlike anything being churned out by anyone else in the Hollywood mainstream. -
26 October 2007The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford + One of the most anticipated films of the autumn, The Assassination of Jesse James has nonetheless been a long time in coming - nearly as long as its title, in fact.Originally set for a 2006 release, with filming completed more than two years ago, despite rave reviews from test screenings for the central performances of Brad Pitt (as James) and Ben's little brother Casey Affleck (as Ford), the fact that the film is a Western seems to have given the studio a number of concerns. -
29 September 2007Stardust + The second directorial effort from British producer Matthew Vaughan, who prior to his debut with Layer Cake in 2004 was best known variously as the best mate of director Guy Ritchie or the husband of supermodel Claudia Schiffer, is a surprising change of direction.After all, Vaughan started out closely associated with the late-1990s revival of the British gangster movie after successfully shepherding Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to worldwide success. -
29 September 2007Rendition + After the high-octane actioner The Kingdom earlier this month, now we get the more subdued, darker side of the war on terror with Rendition.Picking up on one of the most disgraceful aspects of America's current counter-terrorism strategy, it is an overdue high-profile bit of publicity for an aspect of the current war that has received far too little attention from both press and public alike. -
29 September 2007Sicko + Michael Moore's stock has fluctuated wildly over the last six or so years. -
29 September 2007The Lookout + The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank, unsurprisingly also the writer of this intriguing thriller, is something that fans of intelligently constructed films should be anticipating with relish.Best known in Hollywood as a script doctor, working on films as diverse as Minority Report and The Interpreter, it is for two solo screenplays based on Elmore Leonard novels for which film buffs should thank him. -
29 September 2007The Kingdom + Thanks to the generally pro-Britain approach of the United States in the early years of the Second World War, Hollywood began producing movies about the war long before America even entered the conflict - all staunchly pro-Allies.It wasn't until the mid 1960s that any Second World War films began to emerge that were even vaguely critical of any Allied soldiers, or that dared to suggest that, well, maybe it wasn't quite as simple as "all Germans and Japanese are evil" as the movies seemed to make out. -
29 September 2007The Heartbreak Kid + In the late 1990s, it looked as if the Farrelly brothers were the next big thing in Hollywood comedy. -
29 September 2007The Invasion + In today's world of increasing paranoia over the creeping powers of state surveillance, where parallels to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Red Scares of the 1950s are made in the West's liberal press on an almost daily basis, it seems a fairly obvious choice to look to old Cold War parables for sources to rework for the present day.But in hunting them out, it seems rather bizarre to opt for one of those that helped add to the paranoia, rather than point out the insanity of the situation. -
29 September 2007Ratatouille + Despite the vast majority of modern computer-animated children's films revolving around talking animals being derivative and uninspired, with even the latest Shrek movie having lost much of the lustre that made its predecessors so much fun, every now and then the genre still throws up the odd gem.With the behind-the-scenes talent involved in this latest outing from animation giants Disney and Pixar - notably writer and co-director Brad Bird, the chap behind the entertaining The Incredibles and superb The Iron Giant - the signs were always good. -
1 July 2007Atonement + For the last three decades, Ian McEwan has been at the forefront of the British literary scene - a multiple prize-winner and author of innumerable critically-lauded books that have seen him inducted into the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and even given a knighthood.His very first collection of short stories won the Somerset Maugham Prize back in 1976, and considering Maugham's long association with Hollywood it is perhaps only fitting that McEwan's Booker Prize-shortlisted 2001 novel Atonement should now receive the movie treatment.
