Naturalistic performances mark writer-director Clio Barnard’s new film Ali & Ava. She crafts a gritty, working-class story born of pain. Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a Pakistani-British landlord who enjoys a strong relationship with his tenants in Bradford. He also loves his music with a heavier edge. After a tragedy in their lives, Ali and his…
This prequel to the charming and endearing Toy Story franchise didn’t quite give me the buzz that I was expecting. This is actually the second spinoff from Toy Story to feature Buzz Lightyear following 2000’s Buzz Lightyear of the Star Command. But this all seems like a cynical exercise to capitalise on the goodwill delivered…
The Kitchen Brigade is a modest but generally upbeat French comedy and underdog drama from filmmaker Louis Julien Petit, who has worked as a second unit director on a number of popular and successful Gallic comedies like Welcome To The Sticks. The film centres around Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy), a sous chef who works in…
An intricate and cleverly woven tale of naïveté and deception, Xavier Giannoli’s period drama Lost Illusions reminded me of Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Lucien de Rubempre (Benjamin Voisin) is a budding poet working at a printing factory in provincial France in the 1820s. He is feted by noble woman and patroness Louise de Bargeton (Cecile de…
Minions: The Rise of Gru is an origin story and an ode to the music of the ‘70s. The year is 1976. A bored teacher asks the children in her class at elementary school what they want to be when they grow up. Gru (voiced by Steve Carrel) is certain – he wants to be…
Elvis lives. Well, not quite. But Baz Luhrmann has breathed new life into the legend around consummate performer Elvis Presley, the best-selling solo recording artist of all time. Elvis the movie unfolds as a hero and villain story. The hero is obviously Presley (Austin Butler), an artist with a prodigious talent and the villain is…
Men is the third feature film from Alex Garland, best known for Ex Machina and for writing the novel The Beach, which was the source of the Danny Boyle film starring Leonardo Di Caprio. This is a creepy and unsettling film that subverts many of the usual tropes of the horror genre and is more…
Benediction is a complex but ultimately moving biopic about the revered Siegfried Sassoon, one of Britain’s great war time poets. Sassoon wrote about the futility of war, the loss of lives and the waste of a generation on the battlefield. He was also a homosexual who had to hide his sexuality in public. This is…
With a life span approaching that of many a dinosaur (30 years), the Jurassic saga comes to an end with Jurassic World Dominion. And as T. S. Eliot presaged, this fictional world ends not with a bang but a whimper. The franchise – having received a shot in the arm with Jurassic World in 2015…
Asghar Farhadi (A Separation – which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012) is an Iranian filmmaker of extraordinary insight and skill. He writes and directs movies involving ordinary people that have moral quandaries. So it is with his latest film, A Hero. Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) is a man whose wife…
