The movie Living contemplates the rhetorical question “You call that living?”. We’re in London in the 1950s and the respect Mr Williams (Bill Nighy) heads up Public Works at County Hall. He and his staff travel to work each day by train – although not in the same carriage – dressed to the nines (bowler…
In Ti West’s prequel to X (2022), Pearl (Mia Goth) is a star in the making – at least in her own head. It’s 1918, and the combination of WWI and the Spanish flu has many on tenterhooks. Pearl’s husband Howard (Alistair Sewell) – a good man – is off fighting. She lives on a…
Based on a true story, Till is a film full of pain, grief, anger. It’s a powerful howl of outrage against a blatant miscarriage of justice that has never been rectified. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) was holidaying with his cousins in Mississippi. A native of Chicago, Emmett was an outgoing, high spirited,…
In director Bobby Farrelly’s Champions, Marcus (Woody Harrelson) is a basketball coach who dreams of a big future in the NBA. The problem is he has no filter. He says what he thinks, when he wants and doesn’t hold back. So he’s lost several jobs in the US and abroad. Now he’s an assistant to…
Set in the English coastal town of Margate during the turbulent early 1980s, Empire of Light is a sensitive romantic drama. Hilary (Olivia Colman) is manager of the local cinema, the Empire, situated across from the beach. She gets along well with her fellow workers, who include projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) and the diplomatic Neil…
After retiring from the ring three years ago, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) lives to fight another day in Creed III. The film starts back in the day when 15-year-old Creed (Thaddeus James Mixson Jr) was running around with his best friend, 18-year-old Damian Anderson (Spence Moore II), a boxing prodigy. Then a violent incident…
Lonesome is the sexually explicit sophomore feature from writer/director Craig Boreham, one of our finest exponents of queer cinema at the moment, and it follows his 2016 debut Teenage Kicks. The low-budget film looks at the commonality of the LGBTQI+ young men drawn to the big city and the allure of bright lights and excitement…
Has the art of movie titling been lost? Following on from the recent Women Talking comes another film that does exactly what it says on the box with Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear. Cocaine Bear is (very) loosely based on real events. Drug smugglers did indeed dump a load of cocaine over northern Georgia and southern…
Aftersun is a sensitive, heartfelt and naturalistic film by debut writer-director Charlotte Wells. This beautifully reflective piece concerns an 11-year-old girl, Sophie (Frankie Corio) and the last holiday she took with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) two decades earlier. They travel from Scotland to a fading resort in Turkey. They swim, sunbathe, play pool, go…
The internet features prominently in the compelling new psychological thriller Missing from writer-directors Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson. The film starts in San Antonio on April 13th, 2008. As caught on video camera, a father, James (Tim Griffin), is playing with his young daughter June (Ava Lee) when a trickle of blood is seen coming…
